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Biography

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Martha de San Bernardo was a Japanese Catholic of the early seventeenth century who entered the Order of Saint Clare, the enclosed Franciscan sisterhood commonly called the Poor Clares. Surviving records do not preserve her birth name, the precise place of her birth in Japan, or the year she was born. She belonged to the Christian communities that had grown up in Japan after the arrival of Jesuit missionaries in the mid-sixteenth century and the later work of Franciscans and other orders, communities concentrated especially in western Japan. Whether she was baptized as a child in a Christian household or converted as an adult is not stated in the sources that mention her.

From 1614 the Tokugawa shogunate issued nationwide edicts banning Christianity, closing churches, and expelling missionaries. Persecution intensified in the following decades, with public executions, torture, and pressure to apostatize. Japanese Catholics who could do so fled overseas, including to Macao and to Manila, capital of the Spanish Philippines. Martha was among the Japanese Christian refugees who reached Manila. In 1621 a monastery of Poor Clare nuns had been founded there in Intramuros by Mother Jerónima de la Asunción, a Spanish nun who had crossed the Pacific from Mexico. That house, the Real Monasterio de Santa Clara, was the first monastery of the order in the Spanish East Indies.

Martha entered this community and received the religious name Martha de San Bernardo. She is generally regarded as the first Japanese woman to become a fully professed Catholic nun, and one of the first Asian women to be received into a cloistered European order in the Philippines. Spanish colonial convents sometimes restricted choir-nun status according to limpieza de sangre and ethnic origin, yet the Manila Poor Clares did admit Japanese candidates in this period. As a Poor Clare she would have lived under strict enclosure, in poverty, and in a round of liturgical prayer and penance according to the Rule of Saint Clare.

She died in Manila in 1630. The Catholic Church has not beatified or canonized her, and she has no official feast day or listed patronages. Later popular accounts in the Philippines sometimes called her the first Filipino nun, a description that modern historians reject because she was Japanese by birth. Her story remains of interest as evidence of the links between the persecuted Church in Japan and the colonial Church in Manila, and of the early presence of East Asian women in contemplative religious life under Spanish rule. The community she joined continued in Intramuros until the destruction of the walled city in the Second World War and was later re-established elsewhere in Metro Manila.

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