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Christianity in Japan (17th Century)
Christianity was first introduced to Japan in the 1560s when Portuguese Jesuit missionaries arrived at the port city of Nagasaki. It gained popularity and eventually over 200,000 Japanese identified as Christian. However, the Japanese government grew suspicious of the religion, and banned it in early 17th century. The missionaries were forced out of the country, and in the near 300 years of its ban, thousands of Christians were killed or tortured for the Faith. They were hung, beheaded, drowned, burned alive, and some were even crucified. The most famous martyrs from Japan were St. Paul Miki and his companions. In 1597, St. Paul Miki and his 25 companions were forced to march 600 miles from Kyoto to Nagasaki. They were crucified on what is now known as Martyr Hill in February, 1597. The youngest of them was 12 years old. Missionaries arrived again in the 1860s and found the religion thriving in secret. The ban on Christianity in Japan was lifted in 1889 and they have had diplomatic relations with the Vatican for over a century now.
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NOTABLE EXAMPLES
"After Christ's example, I forgive my prosecutors. I do not hate them."
-St. Paul Miki on the cross
The Holocaust
The Holocaust entailed the systematic murder of millions of European Jews as well as non-Jews by the Nazi administration and its associates. The killings happened before and during the Second World War. They were brutal, and other victims were left to starve in the prison camps. The government of Germany, under Adolph Hitler, killed individuals on the basis that their lives were not worthy. The targeted groups included the sexually divergent, ethnically "lesser", mentally impaired and those considered the enemy of the government (Taylor, 2020). Hitler's final move during the war was to completely exterminate the Jews, leading to several massacres by means of gas chambers. Others were held in prisons and camps such Dachau and Auschwitz-Birkenau without proper food, hygiene, and health care. Most of them died of suicide, undernourishment, and illnesses while a few survived.
Evidence documented a lot of weak, sick, and starving prisoners who were about to die. There were mass grass, high-volume crematoriums, gas hallows, and volumes of disgusting medical experimentation documents. More than 10 million humans were killed, including at least 6 million Jews (Taylor, 2020). Anne Frank, a 15-year-old citizen of the Netherlands was captured with her family after hiding from German security (Taylor, 2020). She was transported to various prison camps and unfortunately succumbed to typhus. She remains a symbol of the Jews who were massacred during this era. Another example is a 14-year-old girl from Poland, Czeslawa Kwoka, held as a prisoner at Auschwitz. She was brutally killed by an inmate supervisor (Taylor, 2020). Her innocent, painful, and terrifying death represents what other millions of people experienced in the Holocaust.
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*Oprah Winfrey interview with Elie Wiesel