1597
The monument to the 26 Martyrs on Nishizaka Hill, Nagasaki, where they died.Image: BigCheddah · CC BY-SA 4.0culture · Asia
Twenty-six Christians are executed at Nagasaki
Catholic missionaries had reached Japan in 1549 and won hundreds of thousands of converts, especially around the port of Nagasaki. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had united the country, came to see them as a threat and in 1587 ordered the missionaries out, though at first the order was little enforced. Late in 1596 Hideyoshi had a group of Franciscan friars, Jesuits and Japanese lay Christians arrested in Kyoto and Osaka and marched to Nagasaki. On 5 February 1597 the twenty-six, among them three boys, were executed on crosses on Nishizaka Hill. Twenty were Japanese. It was the start of more than two centuries of persecution, during which Christianity survived only in secret. The martyrs were declared saints in 1862.
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: 26 Martyrs of Japan ↗
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