Nagasaki Martyrs and Hidden Christians

1. The Nagasaki Circuit in One View

Nagasaki is the one Japanese city where the whole arc of Christianity in Japan can be walked on foot. The mission arrived in the middle of the sixteenth century and grew fast in the south-west of the country. Persecution began in earnest in 1597 with the crucifixions on Nishizaka hill, hardened into a total ban in 1614, and produced two and a half centuries in which the faith was carried by laypeople with no priest, no Mass and no confession. The ban ended in 1873. Seventy-two years later the bomb fell on the valley where the largest of those communities had rebuilt itself.

Three anchor sites hold the story, and they sit close together. Nishizaka is a low hill immediately north of Nagasaki Station, with the martyrs' monument and a museum on it. Oura Church stands on a slope on the south side of the harbour, about three kilometres away, facing back towards Nishizaka. Urakami Cathedral is north of the station in the valley of the same name. A pilgrim with a full day can visit all three and still have time to sit in one of them.

The circuit has an internal logic. Nishizaka is where the public Church was destroyed. Urakami is where the faith went underground and where it later came back into the open. Oura is the hinge between the two, the building in which the underground centuries ended in a single conversation on a March afternoon in 1865. Read in that order the sites make sense of one another, and the 1945 layer sits on top of them as the last chapter rather than the first.

2. The Sites at a Glance

The table below lists the principal Christian sites in and around Nagasaki city with the century each one belongs to. Everything in it is fixed history or a standing building, so none of it goes out of date.

The World Heritage components are those listed by UNESCO under the 2018 inscription "Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region". The status of Oura Church as the oldest extant church building in Japan and as a National Treasure follows the designation published by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs.

3. How Christianity Reached Nagasaki

Christianity reached Japan in 1549 when Francis Xavier landed at Kagoshima with two Jesuit companions and a Japanese man, Anjiro, who had met him in Malacca. Xavier stayed a little over two years, preached at Hirado, Yamaguchi and Kyoto, and left the mission to others when he sailed for China, where he died in 1552. His body was carried to Goa and remains there; the shrine that holds it is covered on our page on the basilica of Bom Jesus in Goa.

The mission grew quickly in Kyushu, the southern island, where local lords had reasons of their own to welcome the Portuguese ships that came with the priests. Omura Sumitada, lord of the territory that included the fishing inlet of Nagasaki, was baptised in 1563 with the name Bartolomeu, the first Japanese daimyo to be received. In 1571 he opened Nagasaki as a port for Portuguese trade, and in 1580 he transferred jurisdiction over the town to the Society of Jesus. For about seven years Nagasaki was, in effect, a Christian town administered by the mission.

Why the mission grew so fast

Several things ran together. The Jesuits under Alessandro Valignano adopted a policy of accommodation, learning the language properly, adapting dress and manners, and training Japanese catechists and brothers rather than importing a purely European clergy. The country was in the middle of the Sengoku wars, and religious loyalty and political alliance were tangled together, so a lord's conversion often carried his retainers and his villages with him. And Portuguese trade came in the same hulls as the priests, which gave the mission a leverage it later paid for dearly.

By the 1580s the Church in Japan counted well over a hundred thousand baptised, with printing presses, seminaries and a Japanese embassy sent to Rome in 1582. The Christian population of Kyushu was concentrated exactly where the hidden communities would later survive: Nagasaki, Omura, Arima, Hirado, Amakusa and the coastal villages of Sotome.

Figures for the sixteenth-century Japanese Church come from the annual letters and reports of the Jesuit mission itself, chiefly those of Luis Frois and Alessandro Valignano. They are mission estimates rather than a census, and modern historians treat them as orders of magnitude.

4. Hideyoshi and the Edict of 1587

Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had by then unified most of Japan, issued an edict in 1587 ordering the missionaries out of the country and taking Nagasaki back from Jesuit jurisdiction into his own hands. The edict was published while he was campaigning in Kyushu and had seen for himself how much territory and how many armed retainers the Christian lords controlled. His stated grievances included the destruction of Buddhist and Shinto shrines by Christian converts and the sale of Japanese people into slavery through the Portuguese trade.

Enforcement was light. Hideyoshi wanted the Portuguese ships to keep coming, and the priests understood that, so most of them stayed and worked quietly. For a decade the mission continued under a formal prohibition that nobody pressed. What changed the temperature was the arrival of Spanish Franciscans from Manila in 1593, who worked more openly than the Jesuits and built in Kyoto and Osaka, and the wreck of the Spanish galleon San Felipe off Shikoku in 1596.

The San Felipe affair

Hideyoshi's officials confiscated the galleon's cargo. In the argument that followed, a report reached Hideyoshi that a Spanish officer had said, or implied, that missionaries went ahead of Spanish armies to prepare a conquest. Historians differ on whether the remark was made, whether it was made in that form, and how much it actually determined what came next. What is certain is that Hideyoshi ordered arrests immediately afterwards, and that the men he chose to arrest were mostly Franciscans and the Japanese associated with their houses.

The order was for a public execution of a small, visible group. Hideyoshi wanted the point made in the most Christian city in Japan, which is why the condemned were sent to Nagasaki rather than killed where they were taken.

5. The Arrests and the Winter March

The arrests took place in Kyoto and Osaka at the end of 1596. Six Franciscans were taken with the Japanese laymen who served their church and hospital in Kyoto, along with three men attached to the Jesuits. Part of the left ear of each prisoner was cut off, a mutilation intended as a public mark, and they were paraded through the streets of Kyoto in carts so that the population would see what the sentence was.

Then they were walked south. The route from Kyoto to Nagasaki runs roughly eight hundred kilometres, and it was midwinter. The march took about a month. Two more men joined the group on the road, both of them Japanese Christians who came to help the prisoners and were arrested for doing so and simply added to the column: Francis of Miyako and Peter Sukejiro. Their addition brought the number to twenty-six.

The Jesuit Luis Frois, who was in Nagasaki, wrote an account of the march and the execution from the reports of witnesses. Franciscan accounts were written from Manila. The two sets of sources differ in emphasis, each order giving more space to its own men, and modern historians read them against each other. They agree on the essentials: the route, the mutilation, the parading, and the manner of death.

One detail from the march has stayed in the Japanese memory. The boys in the group, who were the sons and servants of the Christian households in Kyoto, were repeatedly offered release if they would give up the faith, and the offer was renewed at each stage of the road. The accounts record that they refused each time and that the youngest of them asked, at the end, which cross was his.

6. 5 February 1597 on Nishizaka

The executions took place on the morning of 5 February 1597 on Nishizaka, a hill on the north side of the harbour chosen because it could be seen from the water and from the town. Twenty-six crosses were set in a row. The condemned were bound to them at the wrists, ankles and neck with iron rings and rope, in the Japanese manner, with a small support under the feet, and then killed by executioners who drove lances up through the body from either side.

Paul Miki, a Japanese Jesuit scholastic and a trained preacher, spoke from his cross. According to the account preserved in the mission sources and read in the Roman Office of Readings for his feast, he said that he was Japanese and a member of the Society of Jesus, that he had committed no crime, that the only reason he was being put to death was that he had taught the doctrine of Christ, and that he forgave Hideyoshi and every man taking part in his killing. He asked those watching to receive baptism.

The crowd on the hill was large, and a substantial part of it was Christian, since Nagasaki was still full of the faithful. Portuguese and Japanese witnesses took relics from the site afterwards, cloth and blood and splinters of the crosses, which is why fragments of the Twenty-Six turn up in reliquaries in Manila, Macau, Mexico and Europe. The bodies were left on the crosses for a period afterwards as a warning, and the Church later marked the exact ground.

The dates and the feast

Pope Urban VIII beatified the Twenty-Six in 1627. Pope Pius IX canonised them on 8 June 1862. The general Roman calendar keeps them on 6 February under the title Saints Paul Miki and Companions, having moved the memorial off 5 February because that date belongs to Saint Agatha. Japanese dioceses and the shrine itself continue to mark the anniversary on 5 February as well.

7. Who the Twenty-Six Were

The Twenty-Six were a deliberately mixed group, which is part of why they are remembered as they are. Six were Franciscans: four Spaniards, one born in Mexico City and one born at Bassein in India. Three were Japanese members of the Society of Jesus. The remaining seventeen were Japanese laymen: catechists, interpreters, a physician, a carpenter, a silk merchant, servants and boys.

The six Franciscans

• Pedro Bautista Blasquez, the Spanish commissary of the Franciscans in Japan.
• Martin de la Ascension, Spanish priest.
• Francisco Blanco, Spanish priest.
• Francisco de San Miguel, Spanish lay brother.
• Felipe de Jesus, born in Mexico City, later patron of that city, and the first Mexican-born saint.
• Gonzalo Garcia, lay brother, born at Bassein in India of a Portuguese father and an Indian mother, and the first Indian-born saint.

The three Jesuits

• Paul Miki, son of a samurai family, a scholastic of the Society who had not yet been ordained priest, and a trained preacher whose sermons the mission sources single out.
• John Soan de Goto, a young Jesuit brother from the Goto Islands.
• James Kisai, a lay brother received into the Society in prison before the march.

The seventeen laymen

• Leo Karasumaru, a former Buddhist monk and a leading catechist, generally counted the first of the seventeen.
• Paul Ibaraki and Louis Ibaraki, brother and nephew of Leo Karasumaru.
• Anthony of Nagasaki, born in the city of a Chinese father and a Japanese mother.
• Thomas Kozaki and his father Michael Kozaki, a carpenter.
• Matthias of Miyako, Bonaventure of Miyako and Ventura of Miyako.
• Joachim Sakakibara, Cosmas Takeya, Thomas Dangi, John Kisaka, Gabriel of Ise, Paul Suzuki.
• Francis of Miyako and Peter Sukejiro, the two arrested on the road for helping the prisoners.

The list follows the names as they stand in the Roman Martyrology and in the acts of the 1862 canonisation. Several of the Japanese laymen are identified by their town, their household or their trade rather than by a family name, and transliterations differ between English, Spanish and Japanese sources.

Three of the seventeen were children. Louis Ibaraki was twelve, Anthony of Nagasaki was thirteen, and Thomas Kozaki was fourteen; Thomas died on a cross next to his father's. A letter Thomas Kozaki wrote to his mother from the road, telling her that he and his father were about to die and asking her to have the younger children instructed, survives in the mission archive.

The ages given are those recorded in the sixteenth-century mission accounts. Japanese age reckoning of the period differs from the modern count, so some sources give each of the three boys a year older.

8. Nishizaka Today: Monument and Museum

Nishizaka today is a terrace of stone a short walk uphill from Nagasaki Station, and it is a designated national historic site. The centrepiece is a bronze relief by the sculptor Yasutake Funakoshi, unveiled in 1962 for the centenary of the canonisation, showing the twenty-six figures standing in a row at the height of a person, each face distinct and each one facing outward. The relief shows the figures standing upright and calm, with the crosses implied behind them rather than rendered as a crucifixion scene in the European manner.

Behind the monument stands the Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum, and beside it the Church of St Philip of Jesus, named for the Mexican-born Franciscan among the twenty-six. Both were designed by the architect Kenji Imai and completed in the same year as the monument. The church has two slender towers faced in coloured ceramic and glass, a design that Imai developed after studying the work of Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona, and the interior is dim and narrow in a way that has more to do with a catacomb than with a parish hall.

The museum holds material from the mission century and from the underground centuries that followed: documents, devotional objects, and items connected with the persecution. It also holds relics of the martyrs returned to Nagasaki from abroad. For a pilgrim it is the single best introduction to what the rest of the circuit means, and it repays being visited first rather than last.

The popes who have prayed here

Pope John Paul II came to Nagasaki in February 1981, prayed at the martyrs' monument and celebrated Mass in the city in heavy snow. Pope Francis came on 24 November 2019, prayed at Nishizaka and laid flowers there, and celebrated Mass in the city that day. The date was chosen with care: 24 November is the anniversary of the beatification, at Nagasaki in 2008, of Peter Kibe Kasui and 187 companions killed in the seventeenth-century persecution.

9. The Later Martyrdoms at Nishizaka

The Twenty-Six are the most famous of the Nagasaki martyrs and they are a small fraction of the people killed on that hill. After the Tokugawa government banned Christianity outright in 1614, Nishizaka became the standing execution ground for Christians in western Japan, and it stayed in use for more than two decades.

The Great Genna Martyrdom of 1622

On 10 September 1622 fifty-five people were executed together at Nishizaka in the episode Japanese sources call the Great Genna Martyrdom, after the era name. Priests and religious of several orders were burned at the stake. Laypeople, including women and children who had sheltered priests in their houses, were beheaded in front of them. The scale of it, and the deliberate mixing of clergy and the households who had hidden them, made the point the government intended to make about what harbouring a missionary would cost a family.

The figure of fifty-five and the division between burning and beheading follow the contemporary mission accounts of the Genna martyrdom as summarised in the beatification records of 1867. Sources vary by one or two in the total depending on whether prisoners who died before the day are counted.

Lorenzo Ruiz and the sixteen

Lorenzo Ruiz was a Filipino layman from Binondo in Manila, a husband and father who left the Philippines with a group of Dominicans in 1636 and landed in Japan without any intention of becoming a missionary. He was arrested with them, taken to Nagasaki, and put to the tsurushi, the pit torture in which the victim was hung head down in a hole. He died at Nishizaka on 29 September 1637. Pope John Paul II beatified him in Manila in 1981, the first beatification held outside Rome, and canonised him in 1987 with fifteen companions as the Martyrs of Japan. He is the first Filipino saint, and Filipino pilgrims come to Nishizaka on his account; the wider Philippine circuit is set out on our page on pilgrimage sites in the Philippines.

The beatified groups

Two large groups of Japanese martyrs have been beatified beyond the canonised Twenty-Six and the sixteen of 1637. Pope Pius IX beatified 205 Martyrs of Japan in 1867, killed between 1617 and 1632. Pope Benedict XVI approved the beatification of 188 Martyrs of Japan, led by the Jesuit Peter Kibe Kasui, which was celebrated at Nagasaki on 24 November 2008. Kibe himself is worth knowing: refused ordination in Macau, he travelled overland from India through Jerusalem to Rome, was ordained there in 1620, walked and sailed back, worked underground in Japan for years and was killed in Edo in 1639.

10. The Ban, the Fumie and Shimabara

Tokugawa Ieyasu issued a general expulsion of missionaries and prohibition of Christianity in 1614, and his successors enforced it in a way Hideyoshi never had. Churches were pulled down, foreign priests were deported or hunted, Japanese Christians were pressed to recant, and the country closed to almost all foreign contact under the policy later called sakoku. The Portuguese were expelled in 1639, and from 1641 the only European presence permitted was a small Dutch trading post confined to the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki harbour, the Dutch being tolerated partly because they would trade without preaching.

The fumie

From about 1629 the Nagasaki authorities used a test called fumie, the treading picture. A bronze or wooden plaque bearing an image of Christ or the Virgin was laid on the ground and people were required to step on it in front of officials. The ceremony became an annual event in Nagasaki and its surrounding districts, house by house, recorded in registers. Households were also enrolled compulsorily in Buddhist temples under the terauke system, which gave the state a paper record of every family's religion.

The fumie shaped the underground faith in a specific way. Many hidden Christians trod on the image and then went home and performed a rite of penance for having done so, and the pattern of transgression followed by confession to the community's own leader became part of the annual cycle. The moral weight of that act is the subject of Shusaku Endo's novel Silence, published in 1966 and set in this region in the 1630s, and of the Jesuit provincial Cristovao Ferreira, a real figure who apostatised under the pit torture in 1633.

Shimabara, 1637 to 1638

The Shimabara rebellion broke out on the Shimabara peninsula and the Amakusa islands in late 1637. Historians describe it as a peasant revolt against crushing taxation and famine that took on Christian leadership, symbols and banners, under a teenaged figurehead remembered as Amakusa Shiro. Tens of thousands of insurgents and their families held the ruined castle at Hara through the winter and were destroyed there in the spring of 1638 by a besieging force several times their size. The government read the rising as proof that Christianity produced rebellion, and the persecution after Shimabara was harder and more systematic than anything before it. The site of Hara Castle is now a UNESCO component of the Nagasaki inscription.

11. How the Hidden Christians Survived

The hidden Christians survived by turning the parish into a household and the priest's role into a set of lay offices. By about 1644 the last known priest working in Japan had been killed, and the communities that remained had no Mass, no confession, no confirmation, no anointing and no ordination. What they kept was baptism, which any person can validly confer in a case of necessity with water and the Trinitarian form, and which the Church has always recognised when administered that way.

The offices

The structure varied by region and the names varied with it, and the pattern was consistent. A chokata, the keeper of the register, led the community, held the memorised prayers and worked out from the transmitted reckoning when the feasts and fasts fell. A mizukata, the water official, baptised the children. Below them kikiyaku, hearers or messengers, carried word between households and prepared families for the gatherings. Offices passed within families, and the men who held them were often the ordinary headmen of the village to their neighbours.

The calendar and the prayers

The calendar was the spine of the whole thing. In the absence of any printed book, communities in the Sotome region worked from a reckoning attributed to a catechist remembered as Bastian, which set the movable feasts against the Japanese lunar calendar and was recopied and recalculated by hand for generations. The prayers, called orasho from the Latin oratio, were memorised and chanted: the Creed, the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Salve Regina and acts of contrition, in a Japanese heavily marked by Latin and Portuguese and gradually worn smooth by two hundred years of oral transmission. Nobody knew what many of the syllables meant. They were transmitted exactly anyway.

The disguises

Devotion had to be invisible from the doorway. Small statues of the bodhisattva Kannon holding a child, standard Buddhist objects that no official would question, served as images of the Virgin and the infant Christ, and are known as Maria Kannon. Some carried a cross incised on the back or the base. Households kept a closet shrine, the nandogami, behind a sliding door in an inner room. Crosses were worked into the pattern of a lantern or a grave marker. Families attended the Buddhist temple they were registered with, and buried their dead twice, once with the temple and once with their own rite.

Two hundred and fifty years of this did change what was transmitted. By the nineteenth century some communities had drifted a considerable distance in doctrine and in practice, and elements of Buddhist and Shinto observance had been absorbed into the cycle. What the Catholic missionaries found in 1865 was a body of belief that they recognised in its bones and had to work with patiently at the surface.

12. Oura Church and the Discovery of 1865

Oura Church was built for foreigners. The treaties of the late 1850s allowed Western residents in the treaty ports to have their own places of worship, while Japanese subjects remained forbidden by law to be Christian. The Paris Foreign Missions Society sent Fathers Bernard Petitjean and Louis Furet, who built a small Gothic church on the Oura slope above the foreign settlement, completed at the end of 1864 and blessed in February 1865. They dedicated it to the Twenty-Six Martyrs and set it so that its facade looks across the harbour towards Nishizaka.

The missionaries knew the history and hoped there might be survivors, and for a month nothing happened beyond curious sightseers. Then, on 17 March 1865, a group of about fifteen men and women from the Urakami valley came in while Petitjean was praying. A woman, remembered as Yuri Sugimoto, knelt beside him and said quietly that the heart of all those present was the same as his. She then asked where the statue of Santa Maria was.

Petitjean took them to the side altar. The visitors examined the statue, satisfied themselves that the child was there, and began to ask the questions that would settle whether this priest was the real thing: whether he was celibate, whether he obeyed the pope in Rome, and whether he honoured the Mother of God. Over the following weeks messengers came in from village after village. Petitjean reported to Rome that communities existed across the region who had preserved baptism, the prayers and the calendar. The mission's own reports record Pius IX receiving the news as a miracle of the East, and 17 March is kept in Japan as the feast of the Discovery of the Hidden Christians.

Oura Church is designated a National Treasure of Japan and is recorded as the oldest surviving Christian church building in the country. Pope Francis raised it to the rank of minor basilica in 2016. It is one of the twelve components of the World Heritage inscription, and a museum in the former seminary building beside it sets out the story of the Discovery in detail. Ordinary parish life for the area moved out long ago, so the church is now visited chiefly as a monument, and the quietest way to see it is early.

13. The Urakami Crackdowns and the Exile

Coming forward cost the Urakami Christians dearly, because the law that forbade Japanese subjects to be Christian was still in force and remained so for another eight years. Japanese history counts four crackdowns on the Urakami valley, the Urakami Kuzure, in 1790, 1842, 1856 and the last and worst beginning in 1867. The fourth followed directly from the events at Oura, once it became clear to the authorities how many households in the valley were involved.

In 1867 officials raided the valley and arrested its leaders. Under the new Meiji government, which took power the following year and initially reaffirmed the prohibition, the response was escalated into mass deportation. Beginning in 1870 the Christians of Urakami were removed from their homes and distributed among domains across Japan, from Kanazawa to Hiroshima to Tsuwano, to be pressed into apostasy under local custody. The exiles called it simply tabi, the journey. Families were separated, property was confiscated, and prisoners were held in conditions of cold, hunger and forced labour.

The usual figures given are about 3,400 people deported and more than 600 dead in exile. Some recanted under pressure and were returned; many of those later reconciled. The deportations became a diplomatic problem when the Iwakura Mission travelled to the United States and Europe in 1871 and 1872 to renegotiate the treaties, and found the persecution raised against them at every stop. In 1873 the Meiji government removed the public notice boards prohibiting Christianity, and the survivors were allowed to go home.

The deportation and mortality figures for the fourth Urakami Kuzure derive from Meiji government custody records and contemporary mission correspondence as summarised by historians of the period. Different summaries give somewhat different totals, and the count of the dead depends on how deaths after repatriation are treated.

The removal of the boards was an administrative act rather than a grant of religious liberty. Formal freedom of religion came with the Meiji Constitution of 1889, and even then it was hedged. What 1873 achieved was the end of active persecution, and it was enough for the valley to rebuild.

14. Building Urakami Cathedral

Urakami Cathedral was built by the people who had come back from the exile, on a piece of ground they chose deliberately. The site was the property of the village headman, the officer whose house had been the place where the annual fumie was administered and where their own parents and grandparents had been made to tread on the image of Christ. The parish bought it. The church went up on the spot where the apostasy had been enforced.

Construction began in 1895 under the direction of a French missionary of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, and it went slowly because the parish was poor and much of the labour was donated by the parishioners themselves, who carried and laid the brick. The main structure was finished in 1914 and the twin bell towers were completed in 1925, thirty years after the first stone. The finished church was a red-brick Romanesque building with two towers and a statue of the Immaculate Conception above the main altar, and it was commonly described at the time as the largest church in East Asia.

What it meant locally is easier to state than its dimensions. Urakami had been the valley the government came for four times. It was a district of poor farmers on the edge of the city, socially marginal, and its people had been imprisoned within living memory for exactly what the building announced. Putting up the biggest church in the region, over thirty years, on the headman's ground, was a statement made in brick by people who had been given every reason to stay quiet.

15. The Kakure Who Did Not Return

Not every hidden community joined the Catholic Church when it became possible. When the missionaries reached the villages after 1865 they found communities willing to be reconciled, communities that wanted to wait and watch, and communities that declined. The point of difficulty was usually concrete: the priests asked them to give up the closet shrines, to stop the Buddhist observances the households had been keeping for generations, to rebaptise where the transmitted form had drifted, and to accept a foreign priest in place of the village elder who had held the office all his life.

Those who declined are the group Japanese scholarship calls kakure Kirishitan in the strict sense. Their position, stated in their own terms, is that what their ancestors handed down through two and a half centuries of danger is the faith itself, kept at the cost of exile and death, and that a returning European clergy has no standing to correct it. They continued to baptise, to chant the orasho, to keep the transmitted calendar and to venerate the nandogami in the inner room, as their grandparents had.

The Catholic position is that the sacraments and the apostolic ministry belong to the integrity of the faith, that the transmitted practice drifted in ways its own members could not detect, and that the reconciliation the missionaries offered was the completion of what the hidden communities had been holding for. Both things can be said at once without pretending the loss was not a loss. The Church in Japan has treated the kakure with a good deal of respect, and Japanese Catholic scholars have done much of the serious work of recording their prayers and calendars before they disappear.

The surviving practice is concentrated on Ikitsuki island near Hirado and in parts of the Goto archipelago, and it is contracting. Congregations depend on a small number of elders who hold the transmitted texts; young people leave for the cities; groups have dissolved by common decision when nobody remained to take the office. The orasho have been recorded and studied by Japanese ethnographers precisely because the transmission is ending.

16. 9 August 1945 and the Urakami Valley

The atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki on the morning of 9 August 1945 detonated in the air above the Urakami valley, roughly five hundred metres from the cathedral. The intended aiming point had been further south over the city and the harbour; cloud cover moved the drop north, and the weapon went off over the district that held the largest concentration of Christians in Japan. Urakami Cathedral was wrecked. The walls fell, the towers came down, and one of the bells was thrown into the ravine below.

The feast of the Assumption was approaching and the church was in use that morning for confessions. Two priests and the parishioners with them were killed. The parish register of the dead runs to thousands of names, and the district around the cathedral, which was densely built and largely wooden, was destroyed for a considerable distance in every direction.

Casualty figures for Nagasaki vary widely between sources and depend on the cut-off date chosen and on how deaths from radiation illness in the following months are counted. Figures for the Urakami parish dead come from the parish's own register and the records of the Archdiocese of Nagasaki. The location of the hypocentre and the distance to the cathedral follow the survey records published by the City of Nagasaki.

What survived

Three things from the cathedral are now part of the circuit. A section of the south wall, left standing with its statues, was moved and re-erected at the edge of the hypocentre park, where it stands beside the black pillar that marks the point beneath the detonation. The heat-scorched wooden head of the statue of the Immaculate Conception that had stood above the high altar was found in the ruins by a Trappist monk, Kaemon Noguchi, and is now kept in a small chapel at the rebuilt cathedral as the Hibaku no Maria, the bombed Madonna: a blackened face with hollowed eye sockets where the glass eyes had melted. One of the bells was dug out of the rubble intact and rung again at Christmas 1945.

Nearby, at Sanno Shrine, one pillar of a stone torii was left standing when the other was blown away, and the one-legged torii and the scorched camphor trees behind it are part of the same short walk. The Peace Park and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum sit on the same ground.

The rebuilding

The parish rebuilt on the same site in 1959, and the exterior was refaced in brick tile in 1980 to bring it closer in appearance to the church of 1925. There was a serious argument in the city in the 1950s over whether the ruin should be preserved as it stood, as the shell of the Genbaku Dome was preserved at Hiroshima, and the decision to rebuild rather than to keep the ruin is still discussed in Nagasaki. The parish wanted a church. Some of the surviving fabric was preserved and the rest was cleared.

17. Takashi Nagai and a Contested Reading

Takashi Nagai was a radiologist at Nagasaki Medical College, the son of a doctor, raised without religion and drawn to the faith while lodging with the Moriyama family of Urakami, descendants of hidden Christians who had held the office of village leader through the underground centuries. He was baptised in 1934 with the name Paul, after Paul Miki, and married Midori Moriyama. Years of unshielded work with X-rays gave him leukaemia, diagnosed in mid-1945 and expected to kill him within a few years.

He was at the hospital when the bomb went off, was cut by flying glass and worked through the following days treating the injured with a severed artery bound up in his own bandage. His wife was killed at home; he found her remains and the rosary she had been holding. He spent the rest of his life in a two-mat hut he built beside the ruins, named Nyokodo after the command to love one's neighbour as oneself, writing and receiving visitors, and he died in 1951. His best-known book, The Bells of Nagasaki, takes its title from the cathedral bell recovered from the rubble.

The burnt offering

At a requiem Mass held in the ruins of the cathedral in November 1945, Nagai delivered an address in which he spoke of Urakami as a hansai, a whole burnt offering, a sacrifice chosen and accepted by God to bring the war to an end. The image has carried enormous weight in Nagasaki ever since, and it has been contested from the beginning.

Those who hold it say it is the only way the survivors could carry what happened, that it stands in a long tradition of reading Christian suffering through sacrifice, and that it came from a man who had lost his wife and was himself dying. Critics, including other Catholic survivors and later Japanese historians, argue that calling the bombing a sacrifice accepted by God softens a decision made by human beings, absolves those who made it, and pressed the Urakami survivors into a silence about their own grievance that served the postwar order. The argument is a live one in Nagasaki and it has never been settled.

The Church has made no judgement on Nagai's reading. His cause for canonisation has been opened in the Archdiocese of Nagasaki, which concerns the holiness of his life rather than the theology of a single address. For what the Church does teach about suffering and its meaning, our guide to suffering and the problem of evil works through the question directly.

18. Maximilian Kolbe in Nagasaki

Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish Franciscan, lived in Nagasaki from 1930 to 1936. He arrived with almost no Japanese and no money, obtained permission from Bishop Januarius Hayasaka to work in the diocese in exchange for teaching philosophy at the seminary, and within a month was printing a Japanese edition of his magazine Seibo no Kishi, the Knight of the Immaculata. He founded a friary and press on the slope of Mount Hikosan, which he named Mugenzai no Sono, the Garden of the Immaculate.

He chose the site against local advice, on the far side of the hill, on the flank facing away from the city rather than the more convenient ground facing it. When the bomb went off in 1945 the ridge stood between the friary and the detonation, and the buildings survived. The friary is still there, with a small Kolbe museum, and it sits off the usual circuit through the city.

Kolbe returned to Poland in 1936 and was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941. At Auschwitz he volunteered to take the place of a condemned man, Franciszek Gajowniczek, in the starvation bunker, and was killed by injection on 14 August 1941. Pope John Paul II canonised him in 1982. His life is set out on our page on Maximilian Kolbe, and the camp where he died is covered on our page on Auschwitz, Kolbe and Edith Stein. Standing in the Nagasaki friary with those two facts in mind is a strange experience and worth the detour.

19. Beyond the City: Sotome, Goto, Hirado

The hidden Christian story belongs to the coast and the islands more than to the city, and the World Heritage inscription reflects that. UNESCO listed the Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region in 2018 as a serial property of twelve components, and the inscription is written around concealment and transmission, so several components are villages and landscapes rather than monuments.

Sotome

Sotome is the stretch of steep coast north-west of Nagasaki city where two of the villages, Shitsu and Ono, are UNESCO components. These were poor fishing and farming settlements on land nobody wanted, which is why hidden communities lasted there. After the ban ended, a French missionary, Marc Marie de Rotz, was assigned to Shitsu in 1879 and spent the rest of his working life there, building the church, a dispensary, a weaving workshop and a macaroni factory to give the women of the village a cash income. The buildings he put up are still standing. The Endo Shusaku Literary Museum is on the same coast, because this is the country Silence is set in.

The Goto Islands

In the late eighteenth century large numbers of hidden Christians from Sotome migrated to the Goto archipelago to the west, where the lord was recruiting settlers for marginal land. Their descendants built churches after 1873 all over those islands, small wooden and brick buildings on inlets and headlands, several of them designed or built by the self-taught carpenter Yosuke Tetsukawa. Egami Church on Naru Island, Kashiragashima Church built of stone the villagers quarried themselves, and the abandoned village of Nozaki with its Old Nokubi Church are among the UNESCO components. Getting to them takes ferries and time, and the churches are working parishes with tiny congregations rather than visitor attractions.

Hirado, Kuroshima and Amakusa

Hirado was where Francis Xavier preached in 1550 and where the mission had one of its earliest bases. Kasuga village and the sacred places around Mount Yasumandake on Hirado are components, as are the sacred places on the small island of Nakaenoshima offshore, where Christians were executed in the seventeenth century. Ikitsuki island nearby is where kakure practice has survived most strongly, and it is not itself part of the inscription. Kuroshima island, off Sasebo, has a brick church built by its reconciled Christians and its villages are a component. Sakitsu village in Amakusa lies across the water in Kumamoto Prefecture and is a component too, a fishing village where the church was built on the site of the fumie ceremony and where abalone shells were used as objects of devotion.

The list of twelve components and the framing of the inscription follow the entry published by UNESCO for the 2018 World Heritage inscription "Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region".

For where these sites sit in the wider region, our page on pilgrimage sites in East Asia and the Pacific places them alongside the Chinese, Korean and Pacific shrines, and the worldwide index of pilgrimage sites gives the full list.

20. Walking the Circuit With Some Sense

The Nagasaki circuit rewards a slow order rather than a fast one. Start at the Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum on Nishizaka and give it real time, because everything else on the circuit is easier to read afterwards. Go out to the monument and stand in front of the bronze figures. Sit in the Church of St Philip of Jesus behind it. Then cross the harbour to Oura, which makes sense only if you already know what happened on the hill it faces.

Keep Urakami and the 1945 sites for a separate half day, and take them in the order the history ran: the cathedral first, then the hypocentre marker with the cathedral wall standing beside it, then Nyokodo. Taken that way the bomb arrives at the end of a four-hundred-year story rather than at the front of a war memorial, which is how the parish itself understands it.

Some plain advice

• These are working churches. Mass times, entry arrangements and photography rules vary and change, so check on the day with the parish or the shrine office rather than trusting anything printed in advance.
• Oura and Urakami both receive a great deal of general tourism. Early morning is quieter in both.
• The island and coastal sites need ferries and buses and cannot be done as a day trip from the city on top of everything else. Give them their own days or leave them for another visit.
• Several UNESCO components are inhabited villages with small congregations and formal arrangements for visitors. Treat them as somebody's parish and somebody's home.
• If you have been away from confession, a pilgrimage of this kind is a reasonable occasion to come back to the sacrament; ask at the cathedral or a city parish, and our guide to how to go to confession covers the practicalities.

What the Church holds about the martyrs

The Church teaches that martyrdom is the supreme witness to the truth of the faith, a witness borne to the point of death, and that the martyr bears it to Christ who died and rose (Catechism 2473). It also teaches that a person who dies for the faith without having received baptism is baptised by their death, the baptism of blood (Catechism 1258), which is directly relevant to a persecution in which catechumens were killed alongside the baptised. The Church reads both martyrdoms as the work of grace in people who were, by every account we have, ordinary.

Nagasaki is the place where that verse can be checked against the ground. A public Church was destroyed in 1597 and again in 1614. Two and a half centuries later a group of farmers walked into a new church and asked where the statue of Santa Maria was, and the answer to that question is the diocese that stands there now. For the wider Catholic understanding of the martyrs and the communion of saints, see our guide to the saints, and for what a pilgrimage is meant to be, our page on what a pilgrimage is.