Michael Kozaki

Michael Kozaki was a Japanese Catholic layman of the late sixteenth century and one of the Twenty-six Martyrs of Japan. He was born in Ise, in the region of present-day Mie Prefecture. Traditional accounts give his age at death as about forty-six, which places his birth around 1551. He earned his living as a craftsman, described in the sources variously as a carpenter or a bow-maker. In the decades after Francis Xavier’s arrival in Japan in 1549, a substantial Christian community had formed; Kozaki was a convert of that missionary era and lived as a lay believer in central Japan.

He was married and the father of at least one child, Thomas Kozaki, who was still a boy in his early teens at the time of their deaths. The family belonged to the Christian community that had grown up under the Jesuit and later Franciscan missions. After Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s 1587 edict against missionaries, Japanese Christians lived under increasing threat, though enforcement remained uneven for some years. The situation worsened after the wreck of the Spanish galleon San Felipe in 1596, when Hideyoshi ordered the arrest of Franciscans and Japanese associated with them in the Kyoto and Osaka area.

Michael and his son were among those taken. The condemned—six Franciscan friars, three Japanese Jesuits including Paul Miki, and seventeen Japanese lay people—were publicly mutilated and then compelled to march in winter from the capital region to Nagasaki, a journey of many weeks meant to display them as a warning. Hagiographical tradition records that Michael encouraged his son to persevere in the faith during the march and at the place of execution. Thomas is remembered for a farewell letter written to his mother.

On 5 February 1597 they were crucified on Nishizaka Hill in Nagasaki and killed with lances. Michael Kozaki died together with his son Thomas. The twenty-six were beatified by Pope Urban VIII in 1627 and canonized by Pope Pius IX on 8 June 1862. Their feast is kept on 6 February. They are venerated as patrons of Japan, and the site of their martyrdom is commemorated by the Twenty-Six Martyrs Monument and Museum in Nagasaki.