Biography
Matthew Kohioye
About Matthew Kohioye
Matthew Kohioye was a young Japanese Dominican religious who worked with the priest Luke Alonso Gorda. The Roman Martyrology remembers him as an eighteen-year-old companion in spreading and witnessing to the Christian faith. Its entry distinguishes Matthew, a religious brother, from Luke, a priest.
Arrested with Luke in Osaka in 1633, he was taken to Nagasaki. He refused to renounce Christianity and died on October 19. Luke’s account calls him Brother Matthew of the Rosary.
John Paul II canonized Matthew with fifteen other martyrs on October 18, 1987. Reporting that day, Peggy Polk named him among the Japanese catechism teachers in the group. The canonization brought together people killed in different years, from 1633 to 1637, rather than sixteen companions executed on one occasion.
The order’s September 28 group memorial complements the Roman Martyrology’s October 19 commemoration of Matthew and Luke.
A modern sculpture gives his youth a visible place in Nagasaki’s remembrance of the martyrs. In a 2015 account of the memorial project, sculptor M. A. Ikeda described a slender figure wearing sandals and a hood. The artist imagined the hood as something women might have made to protect the young brother from the cold. That detail belongs to the sculpture’s interpretation, rather than to an authenticated portrait or a surviving item of Matthew’s clothing.
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