Story
Boys who could walk to the sea
Nobody knows exactly where the Arima seminary stood. The topography has changed since the sixteenth century, and the oldest maps date from the 1640s, sixty years after the school was founded.One small detail survives in the written records: the students could walk from the seminary down to the sea. From that, the Jesuit historian Diego Pacheco, founding director of the Museum in , worked out that the seminary was most likely on the spot where a signboard now stands, a short walk from Kita-Arima station in the city of Minami-Shimabara.
It is a fitting memorial: a field, a sign, and the sea a short walk away. The school that stood near here sent its boys farther than any school in Japan before it, to Rome, and , and back again to die for the faith at home.
A school for Japanese priests
When the Jesuit Visitor came to Japan in 1579, he saw that the Church needed far more priests than Europe could send, and that the only way to have them was to train Japanese Christians for the priesthood.He baptised the young lord of Arima, , and with his help opened in 1580 two seminaries, one at Arima in the castle town below Hinoe castle and another at Azuchi, 's capital on Lake Biwa, with a college at in Bungo.Harunobu gave the Jesuits the grounds and buildings of a former Buddhist monastery for the purpose.Minami-Shimabara City calls it the first Christian educational institution in Japan.
Valignano meant the seminaries for "talented boys of the better families", who were to receive "a general training in both Japanese and European culture", and from whom would come both future priests and lay leaders of the Church.The Yamakawa dictionary adds that boys who were not Christians were taken too, and that all lived together as boarders.Among the first twenty pupils was a boy from named .In 1550 had stayed at Hirado in the house of a samurai named Kimura, who asked for baptism with his whole family; Sebastião was, by the account of modern scholarship, his grandson (an older English life says nephew).He had been helping the missionaries as a dōjuku, a lay assistant, since the age of twelve.The Arima boys, our Kimura page notes, were the experiment: trained to help with Mass and the sacraments, preaching and catechism.In 1582 Sebastião was one of five seminary boys admitted to the Society of Jesus, and began his novitiate at Usuki in Bungo.
His road shows how long the experiment took. He worked in , then in Hirado, Arima and Mie near Shimabara; he learned Latin well enough to teach it at the Amakusa college; in 1595 or 1596 he went to Macao for theology, and was made subdeacon there in 1598 with two other Japanese, Julian Yamada and Luis Niabara.The three reached Nagasaki on 13 August 1600, and Bishop Luís de Cerqueira ordained them deacons that September.Twenty years had passed since the seminary opened.
What they learned
The course took three or four years.Heibonsha's encyclopedia, in an entry by the historian Ide Katsumi, lists what was taught by a fixed daily timetable: Latin, Japanese, Christian doctrine and ethics, music, singing and instrument playing, and the arts and crafts of watercolour and oil painting, copperplate engraving, the cutting of printing type and the building of organs.The city adds geography and astronomy.Yamakawa notes that Japanese and Latin literature were both taught, and that music had a particular place.Minami-Shimabara describes it as the most advanced Western education of its day; the multilingual heritage text calls it a meeting of Eastern and Western culture.
The aim, Laudate says in its pilgrims' guide, was to form people who would serve others, on three pillars: religion, language and literature, and art.It is worth pausing on what that meant. Barely thirty years after Xavier's landing, boys on a Kyushu peninsula were singing and playing European instruments, reading Japanese and Latin literature, and learning to paint in oils, engrave copper and cut type.Those who wished to become priests went on, Yamakawa explains, to the novitiate and then to the higher college, the colégio.It was not a foreign school planted on Japan, but a school that meant to make Japanese Christians at home in both worlds, as Valignano intended.Mypedia notes that seminaries were also set up at and Ōmura, but Arima's and Azuchi's were the first.
Four boys for Rome
In 1582 Valignano chose four boys in haste from the Arima seminary to go to Europe: Itō Mancio, Chijiwa Miguel, Hara Martinho and Nakaura Julião.The sailed from Nagasaki that February, was received by Pope on 23 March 1585, and came home in 1590 with a European printing press.All four entered the Society of Jesus. Mancio was ordained priest in 1608 and died at Nagasaki in 1612; Martinho became a noted preacher and died in exile in Macao in 1629; Julião stayed in Japan through the persecution and died in the pit at Nagasaki on 21 July 1633, and was beatified in 2008 (see Blessed Julian Nakaura, the Envoy Who Came Home).
A school on the move
The seminary did not stay in one place. In 1582, after the death of Nobunaga, the moved to Takatsuki in Settsu, invited by ; after 's expulsion order of 1587 it was merged with Arima's.The combined school then moved, Heibonsha says, to Hachirao, Katsusa, Arie, Amakusa and Nagasaki.The Nagasaki prefecture's heritage site gives the same road: Arima until early 1587, then within the Arima lands to Hachirao, Katsusa and Arie, and on to Nagasaki.Minami-Shimabara counts seminaries at Arima, Hachirao and Arie, and colleges at Katsusa and Arie, within its own borders; for more than twenty years, until 1611, the area was a key centre for forming the Church's leaders.Laudate says the school had to move three times, and that in 1584 it was moved to a more convenient spot near Hinoe castle.
Back to Arima, 1601
In 1601 the seminary came home. Laudate says it moved into a fine house where Harunobu himself had lived for a year; it grew to more than a hundred pupils, and among its teachers were Itō Mancio and .The prefecture's site says it stayed until 1612, and that the estimated site in Kita-Arima is the place of those last years.
One of the boys who came with it was from the Kunisaki peninsula in Bungo. had entered the seminary at Nagasaki in 1600, aged thirteen; after a fire there on 29 October 1601 the school moved to Arima, and he moved with it.He finished the six-year course in 1606 and hoped to join the Jesuits; they did not take him then, and the sources do not say why.He served instead as a dōjuku.Laudate names him and Thomas Kinzuba Jihyōe among those who studied at Arima.
Meanwhile, on 22 September 1601, in the church of Our Lady of the Assumption in Nagasaki, Sebastião Kimura and Luis Niabara were ordained priests, the first Japanese ever.The experiment that had begun with twenty boys at Arima had borne its first fruit.
The end
The seminary's protector fell before the ban. In 1612 Harunobu was ruined by the Okamoto Daihachi bribery affair and exiled to Kai. When officers came to put him to death and invited him to kill himself, he answered that it was forbidden to Christians; he died on 5 June 1612 (the Kodansha dictionary says by seppuku, the Jesuit sources and Nipponica by beheading).That year the Arima seminary closed.The general ended all the seminaries.Mypedia notes that a separate seminary for the diocesan clergy, founded by Bishop Cerqueira in Nagasaki in 1601, also lasted until 1614.
Its pupils carried the school with them. Kibe went into exile; told at Macao in 1616 that he would not be ordained, he made his way overland by India, Persia and Jerusalem to Rome, was ordained there in November 1620, spent years fighting his way back into Japan, and died in the pit in Edo in 1639, refusing to the end to apostatise.Kimura spent years hiding in disguise and on 10 September 1622 was the last to die in the fires of the Great Martyrdom at Nagasaki.Nakaura died in the pit in 1633.The Arima lands themselves, the heritage text says, became one of the centres of the mission.
Today
A signboard near Kita-Arima station marks the estimated site.It is a quiet place, and that is perhaps right: what the seminary left was not a building but people. Nearby, the ruins of Hinoe castle, the Arima Christian Heritage Museum and, a little farther south, , where Arima's Christians made their last stand in 1638, tell the rest of the story.The prefecture's heritage text sums up the seminary's meaning: it "plainly tells" of the educational and cultural exchange between Japan and Europe in the age of discovery.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Kimura grandson or nephew of Xavier's Hirado host. Disputed.
- Harunobu's manner of death: seppuku or beheading. Disputed.
- The 1584 move: Laudate only. Unverified.