Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 427, The Ones Who Walked Away.

We are now, after over a month, finished with our series on the rise and fall of Christian

Nagasaki, and I don't know about you all, but I'm ready for a break from the late 16th and

early 17th centuries for a good spell. But before we leave,

there are a pair of stories I really want to tell. Biographies I found utterly fascinating to

learn about, but which didn't fit well into the main narrative of the Nagasaki story, which was

already pretty packed, as I'm sure you noticed. So before we leave, and while that's all

still fresh, I want to tell the stories of a pair of Japanese men whose lives say a lot, at least in

my opinion, about the trajectory of the Christian faith during the late Sengoku and early Tokugawa

years. Both men were, from what we can tell, true believers, at least at some

point. Both went so far as to become ordained priests. And both, for one reason or another,

ended up abandoning the faith, apostatizing, in other words, and spent the final years of their

lives not protecting Christianity, but denigrating and in one case actively trying to crush it.

So let's dive right in and see what we can see from these fascinating stories.

Our story begins with a man who was, once upon a time, one of Japan's most celebrated Christians, Chijiwa Miguel.

I can't tell you exactly when he was born. The best guesses I've seen are somewhere around

1569 or 1570. However, I can tell you who he was born too. The young man was from a pretty

prominent family. Specifically, he was the second son of Chijiwa Nao Kazu,

the leader of the Chijiwa family of Chihuah Township,

still a municipality of modern Nagasaki.

The Chijua were a family of prominent retainers to the Arima,

the lords of the Shimabara Peninsula,

...