| Around Nagasaki Station | Smaller picture | |
1. The 26 Martyrs' Memorial |
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The background for this memorial is as follows: In 1596 a Spanish ship capsized on Shikoku, and the sailors boasted that the Christian missionary was just pretext for colonisation of Japan as a whole. This worried Shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi and eventually he cracked down and he had six missionaries and twenty Japanese converts crucified in Nagasaki. Christianity would remain banned until a few years after the Meiji restoration. |
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