Today is the feast of St. Paul Miki and Companions, martyrs of Japan.
St. Paul Miki, a Japenese Jesuit, was a convert to Catholicism. He was a popular preacher, and on February 5, 1597, he, along with two other Jesuits, were publicly crucified in Nagasaki.
Recommended: Silence - a movie available free on freevee. The movie is a powerful story of the tragedy of later waves of persecutions that continued in Japan and essentially eradicated Christianity from sight.
From Wikipedia:
Silence is a 2016 epichistorical drama film directed by Martin Scorsese and with a screenplay by Jay Cocksand Scorsese, based on the 1966 novel of the same name by Shūsaku Endō. The plot follows two 17th-century Jesuitpriests who travel from Portugal to Edo-era Japan via Macau to locate their missing mentor and spread Catholic Christianity. The story is set in a time when it was common for the faith's Japanese adherents to hide from the persecution that resulted from the suppression of Christianity in Japan after the Shimabara Rebellion against the Tokugawa shogunate. These are now called the kakure kirishitan, or "hidden Christians".