James Kisai

James Kisai (also known as Diego Kisai or Jacobo Kisai; Japanese: ヤコブ・キサイ) was a Japanese Jesuit lay brother and one of the Twenty-six Martyrs of Japan. He was born in 1533 at Okayama in Bizen Province, in a household that followed Buddhism rather than Christianity. As an adult he accepted baptism and attached himself to the Jesuit mission as a catechist, or dōjuku, assisting priests in the instruction of converts and in the ordinary work of the residences. Traditional accounts place much of this service at Osaka, where the Society of Jesus maintained a house during the later sixteenth century.

Hagiographical sources record that Kisai had been married and was the father of a child. His wife later abandoned Christianity and left him; he then placed the child with a Christian family and gave himself more completely to mission work. In the mid-1590s he sought admission to the Society of Jesus as a temporal coadjutor (lay brother). He was received into the order around the time of his arrest, some accounts saying formally while he was already imprisoned. He was never ordained; his vocation remained that of a brother and catechist rather than a priest.

After the San Felipe incident of 1596, Toyotomi Hideyoshi renewed the prohibition of Christianity. Kisai was seized at Osaka together with the Jesuit scholastic Paul Miki and the young Jesuit brother John Soan de Gotō. They were joined to a larger group of Franciscan friars and Japanese lay Christians, twenty-six in all, who were condemned to death. In Kyoto the prisoners were publicly mutilated, then forced to make the long overland march to Nagasaki as a warning to other believers. On 5 February 1597 they were crucified on Nishizaka Hill overlooking Nagasaki. Kisai, then about sixty-four years old, was bound to a cross and killed by the spear-thrust customary in Japanese crucifixion of that period.

The twenty-six were beatified by Pope Urban VIII in 1627 and canonized together by Pope Pius IX on 8 June 1862. In the General Roman Calendar their feast is kept on 6 February (transferred from the anniversary of the execution because 5 February is already occupied by Saint Agatha). James Kisai is venerated as a saint of the Catholic Church and as one of the three Jesuits among the Nagasaki martyrs. Relics and memorials associated with the group are preserved at Nishizaka and in churches dedicated to the Twenty-six Martyrs; a single, undisputed burial place for Kisai himself is not recorded.