Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum and Monument

On Nishizaka Hill, a short steep walk above Nagasaki Station, a long bronze relief of twenty-six standing figures gazes out over the city. This is the Monument to the Twenty-Six Martyrs of Japan, and the museum behind it tells one of the most moving and important stories in the history of Christianity in Asia—a story that is central to understanding why Nagasaki became, and remains, the heart of the Japanese Catholic Church.

Christianity arrived in Japan in 1549 with the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier, and in the second half of the sixteenth century it spread rapidly, especially in the Nagasaki region, winning hundreds of thousands of converts. But as the newly unifying rulers of Japan grew wary of foreign influence, the faith fell under suspicion. In 1597 the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered the arrest of a group of Christians—six European Franciscan missionaries, three Japanese Jesuits and seventeen Japanese lay believers, among them children. They were marched in the depths of winter more than 800 kilometres from Kyoto and Osaka to Nagasaki, mutilated along the way as a warning, and on 5 February 1597 crucified together on this hill, chosen because it overlooked the port where Christianity had taken root. Witnesses recorded that they sang and prayed as they died.

The twenty-six were canonised as saints by the Catholic Church in 1862, and in 1962, on the 365th anniversary of the martyrdom, the present monument and museum were created. The bronze relief, by the sculptor Yasutake Funakoshi, depicts the twenty-six figures life-size, serene in the face of death; it has become one of the most recognisable images of Christian Japan. Behind it stands St Philip's Church, designed by the architect Kenji Imai, whose extraordinary twin towers—clad in colourful ceramic mosaic and inspired by the work of Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona—make it one of the most visually arresting churches in the country.

The museum itself is a serious and absorbing institution. Its collection documents the whole arc of Christianity in Japan: the arrival of the missionaries, the flourishing of the faith, the centuries of brutal persecution that followed, and the remarkable survival of the "Hidden Christians" (Kakure Kirishitan), who maintained their beliefs in secret for more than two hundred years while the religion was banned on pain of death, worshipping in disguise and passing on their faith through carefully camouflaged objects. Exhibits include rare religious artefacts, letters, the fumi-e (images of Christ that suspected believers were forced to trample to prove they were not Christian), and materials on Nagasaki's role as the centre of the faith's rebirth after Japan reopened in the nineteenth century.

The site is quietly powerful, best visited in the calm of the morning, and it provides essential context for Nagasaki's many Christian sites—Oura Church, Urakami Cathedral and the churches of the surrounding region, several now UNESCO World Heritage listed. It is an easy walk from the station and pairs naturally with the start or end of a day's sightseeing.

Open daily and modestly priced, the Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum is not a comfortable visit, but it is a deeply worthwhile one—an unflinching memorial to faith and endurance that helps explain the singular religious history of this most cosmopolitan of Japanese cities.