Saint Thomas Kozaki

Saint Thomas Kozaki was a Japanese Christian of the late sixteenth century, venerated by the Catholic Church as one of the Twenty-Six Martyrs of Japan. He was the son of Michael Kozaki, a carpenter who worked for the Franciscan missionaries and belonged to the Third Order of Saint Francis. Thomas, still a boy at the time of his death and commonly described in the martyrdom accounts as about fourteen years of age, was formed in the faith by the Franciscans and served as a catechist, assisting in the instruction of other children. His family belonged to the generation of Japanese converts that had grown up after the opening of the Catholic mission, which had begun with the Jesuit Francis Xavier in the mid-sixteenth century and had later been joined by Franciscan friars from the Philippines. Exact records of his place and year of birth have not survived; what the contemporary reports preserve is his youth, his relationship to his father, and his close association with the Franciscan community in the Kyoto and Osaka region.

By the 1590s the Japanese church numbered many tens of thousands of believers, but it existed under increasing political threat. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who dominated Japan after the wars of unification, had issued an edict against missionaries in 1587, though enforcement remained uneven for several years. The wreck of the Spanish galleon San Felipe on the Japanese coast in 1596, and statements attributed to its pilot about the use of missionaries to prepare foreign conquest, furnished a pretext for a sharper persecution. Franciscans and their Japanese collaborators in the capital region were arrested. Thomas and his father Michael were among those taken into custody. The prisoners were publicly humiliated, a portion of one ear being cut off, and were exhibited through Kyoto and neighboring towns in order to intimidate other Christians.

They were then compelled to march in winter over the long road from the Kinai region to Nagasaki, a journey of several hundred miles. On 5 February 1597 the twenty-six condemned persons—six Franciscan friars of Spanish, Mexican, and Indian origin, three Japanese members of the Society of Jesus including Paul Miki, and seventeen Japanese lay Franciscans, among them the boys Thomas Kozaki, Louis Ibaraki, and Anthony Deynan—were led to Nishizaka Hill above Nagasaki harbor and bound to crosses. The hagiographical tradition, drawing on eyewitness and near-contemporary missionary reports, records that the boys showed notable calm. Thomas is said to have written from prison to his mother, telling her that he and his father were going to heaven, asking her not to grieve, and urging her to persevere in the Christian faith. At the place of execution the youths sang and encouraged those around them. Death was inflicted by spear thrusts, according to the method used in those crucifixions.

The Nagasaki martyrdoms became widely known in Catholic Asia and in Europe through printed relations and the testimony of missionaries. The twenty-six were beatified together by Pope Urban VIII on 14 September 1627. They were canonized by Pope Pius IX on 8 June 1862. In the General Roman Calendar their memorial is kept on 6 February, the day following the anniversary of the crucifixion, which coincides with the older feast of Saint Agatha. Thomas Kozaki is therefore honored not as an isolated figure but as a child martyr within that company, a witness of the early Japanese church alongside his father Michael and the other companions of Paul Miki.

Because Thomas died so young and because the documentation of ordinary Japanese Christians in that period is sparse, almost everything that can be said of him with confidence derives from the group acts of the Twenty-Six Martyrs rather than from a separate biography. Later devotion has remembered him especially for his youth, his letter to his mother, and his steadfastness on the cross. A monument and museum on Nishizaka Hill in Nagasaki commemorate the site of the execution. Individual patronages attached to Thomas alone are not clearly established in the historical record; he shares in the veneration given to the martyrs of Japan as a whole.