Twenty-Six Martyrs of Japan Museum

photo by 松永如庵 · CC BY 3.0

photo by Balon Greyjoy · CC0

Twenty-six bronze figures, one for each person crucified in 1597, in a wall 17 metres long.

In Nishizaka Park, on 5 February 1597, twenty-six Christians (six foreign missionaries and twenty Japanese, among them a twelve-year-old boy) were crucified on the orders of Toyotomi Hideyoshi: the first mass persecution of Christians in Japan. In 1962, for the centenary of their canonisation, the sculptor Funakoshi Yasutake cast twenty-six life-size bronze figures in a granite wall 5.5 metres high and 17 long, titled ‘Prayer of the Ascension’; the museum next to it, designed by Imai Kenji, won the prize of the Architectural Institute of Japan the same year.

A Catholic museum on the historic site of the martyrdom, a prefecture-designated historic site (県指定史跡), opened in 1962. It displays documents and objects on the history of Christianity in Japan, from Francis Xavier's mission of 1549 to the persecutions and the secret life of the kakure kirishitan (the ‘hidden Christians’ who kept their faith in secret for two and a half centuries).

ℹ️ Open 9:00–17:00, closed 31 December–2 January. Admission: adults 500 yen, junior high/high school students 300 yen, elementary school pupils 150 yen. 5 minutes’ walk from JR Nagasaki Station.

🚉 Nagasaki · 8 min walk

Sources: ja.wikipedia.org · at-nagasaki.jp · city.nagasaki.lg.jp · nagasaki.catholic.jp

All series · Open the map