Amami Ōshima: the anti-Catholic campaign of the 1930s

Amami Ōshima, between Kyushu and Okinawa, received the Catholic faith from the Paris Foreign Missions around the 1890s (Unverified).¹It spread fast. About thirty years after the mission began, by 1923, more than 4,000 islanders had become Catholics.¹The islanders hoped the Church would bring relief from poverty, and medicine, welfare and schooling.¹In 1921 the Canadian province of the Franciscans took over the mission from the Paris Foreign Missions.¹A Franciscan at Ōkasari, Fr Pio, wrote to his provincial in 1927 that young Catholics were being trained as nurses in Tokyo for a planned clinic; by 1930 he and the Catholic nurses had cared for about 5,000 patients there and treated 260 more at home.¹At the request of members of the Naze town council, who wanted better schooling for girls, the Franciscans opened the Ōshima Girls' High School in 1924, on town land lent for ninety-nine years.¹Its white concrete building and the brick Sacred Heart church in Naze, finished in 1922, were among the few modern buildings on the island.¹

But Amami was also a fortress zone, and the foreign priests were suspect. Through the 1920s local newspapers repeated accusations that Canadian priests were spies and that the girls' school did not read the Imperial Rescript on Education properly.¹In July 1933 a supplementary memorandum to the school's land contract went "missing" from the town office, and the papers reported it as the theft of a document by Catholics, a "traitors' affair".¹In August a rally of about 5,000 people, called by a local "national defence study society", demanded action against the Catholics and the closing of the school; in September the town council voted to close it.¹Former students and some Catholics protested, but the Franciscans gave way, and the school closed at the end of March 1934.¹

Then the campaign turned on the faithful themselves. In December 1934, after "patriotic lectures" by the commander of the Amami fortress and another officer, newspapers reported that in Catholic villages the believers had "all converted" and their crosses had been burned by the youth associations; the two remaining foreign priests left the island on December 12.¹At Ōkuma, Catholics were penned inside a roped area and not allowed out until they renounced their faith.¹Rosaries, statues of Mary and church bells were confiscated and burned; under the name of fire drills, water was hosed onto the houses of Catholics who would not give up.¹Villagers wrecked the church at Akina.¹In 1936 the Franciscans gave the church properties to Kagoshima Prefecture, which passed them to the towns and villages; most served as town offices and public halls until the end of the war, and the Naze church itself became the town hall.¹

Aso concludes that the Catholic community on the island was effectively destroyed, and that the believers were forced to live "like hidden Christians."¹Some still gathered secretly in the churches to pray while they could.¹