Toyotomi Hideyoshi's successors moved against the growing Christian community in Japan, viewing Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries as agents of foreign influence. The roundup of converts and priests in early February 1597 culminated in one of the most infamous martyrdoms in Japanese religious history.
Christianity had spread rapidly in Japan since Francisco Xavier's arrival decades earlier, converting feudal lords and commoners alike. But the shogunate grew increasingly suspicious that missionaries were the vanguard of Spanish and Portuguese colonization, pointing to the Philippines as a cautionary example.
In early February, officials arrested Franciscan friars, Jesuit brothers, and Japanese lay Christians in Kyoto and Osaka, marching them nearly 600 miles to Nagasaki as a public warning. Twenty-six of them, including boys as young as twelve, would be crucified on a hill overlooking the harbor on February 5, 1597, canonized centuries later as the Twenty-Six Martyrs of Japan.
The episode marked a turning point toward the sakoku policy of near-total isolation that would define Japan for over two centuries, as the shogunate concluded that foreign religion and foreign trade were inseparable threats to its authority.