Abstract

The article traces the career as martyr of the newly beatified Takayama Ukon, a Japanese daimyō converted to the Christian faith by Jesuit missionaries in the second half of the 16th century. An agent of Catholic proselytism among his subjects, Ukon already had a reputation for holiness when he died in exile in Manila in 1615. His trajectory appearsto be an effective and instructive metaphor for a counter-reforming Catholicism capable, outside Europe, of devising strategies of accommodation to the local culture in order to spread in a society perceived as hostile and immune to the political influence of Europeans. It also provides an opportunity to reflect upon the process of constructing an alternative Jesuit missionary holiness through the valorization of a “martyrdomµ without the effusion of blood – a martyr without martyrdom, in fact.