26 Martyrs of Japan
Japanese missonaries and converts to the Catholic church, venerated as Saints
The 26 Martyrs of Japan (Japanese: 日本二十六聖人, Hepburn: Nihon Nijūroku Seijin) were a group of Catholics who were executed by crucifixion on 5 February 1597, in Nagasaki, Japan. Their martyrdom is especially significant in the history of the Catholic Church in Japan.
A promising beginning to Catholic missions in Japan – with perhaps as many as 300,000 Catholics by the end of the 16th century – met complications from competition between the missionary groups, political difficulty between Portugal and Spain and factions within the government of Japan. Christianity was suppressed and it was during this time that the twenty-six martyrs were executed. By 1630, Catholicism had been driven underground. When Christian missionaries returned to Japan 250 years later, they found a community of "hidden Catholics" that had survived underground.
Early Christianity in Japan
On 15 August 1549, the Jesuit fathers Francis Xavier (later canonized by Gregory XV in 1622), Cosme de Torres, and Juan Fernández arrived in Kagoshima, Japan, from Portugal with hopes of bringing Catholicism to Japan. On 29 September, St. Francis Xavier visited Shimazu Takahisa, the daimyō of Kagoshima, asking for permission to build the first Catholic mission in Japan. The daimyō agreed in hopes of creating a trade relationship with Europe.
“26 Martyrs of Japan” enters the record as japanese missonaries and converts to the Catholic church, venerated as Saints. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Martyrs, Japan and Japanese can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q578963. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1597, 1630, 1549 and 1622.
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This entry incorporates text from “26 Martyrs of Japan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.