The Azuchi Seminary, Japan's First Christian School in the Capital Region

What they built, the plaque on the site says, was a fine three-storey house. On the ground floor were reception rooms with a tea room. On the second floor lived the priests. The third floor held the classrooms and the boys' dormitory.¹By Nobunaga's special leave it was roofed with the same pale blue tiles as his castle.¹Soon after it was finished it opened as a seminary, a school for boys who might one day become priests.¹³

The Visitor Alessandro Valignano had planned the Japanese seminaries and written their rules himself; one was opened at Arima in 1580, and this was the second.³His plan was for one seminary in each of the three mission districts, for gifted boys of good families, who would be taught the humanities and trained in both Japanese and European culture. The third, planned for Bungo, never opened because of the wars there.³Cieslik's verdict on the whole venture is warm: driven from place to place, these schools still rendered splendid services to the Church in Japan and gave it many able workers until 1614.³The boys studied Japanese literature, Christian doctrine, Latin, rhetoric and music.¹When Valignano left Japan in 1582, each seminary had about twenty-six pupils.³

Not all the teachers were Europeans. Valignano named a Japanese, Vicente Hōin, to teach preaching at Azuchi. He was thought the most expert of them all in the language and customs of Japan, and he taught the boys how to answer the teachings of the Buddhist sects, which he knew from the inside. When the priests were away, it was Vicente who looked after the seminary.¹¹The future preachers of Japan were being trained by a Japanese preacher.

Valignano visited Nobunaga in Azuchi more than once, and held a meeting of the missionaries there.³In 1581, Cieslik writes in his life of Luís Fróis, the Visitor obtained leave during his stay in the capital to open at Azuchi a college for the education of young nobles, and Organtino was made its rector.⁹Valignano stayed at Azuchi from June into July of that year.⁸

Fróis knew the town well. He had often been to Azuchi, and Nobunaga once showed him round the castle himself. On top of the hill in the middle of the city, Fróis wrote, Nobunaga had built a palace and castle which "as regards architecture, strength, wealth and grandeur may well be compared with the greatest buildings of Europe".¹⁰The seminary stood below it, in its shadow, under the same blue tiles. Nobunaga gave him a great painted screen of the castle and town of Azuchi, which went to Rome with the Tenshō embassy and was presented to Pope Gregory XIII in 1585; no trace of it has been found since.³⁵

One of the pupils was Paul Miki, the son of a samurai of Awa named Miki Handayū. He was born in about 1564 and baptised as a child.¹After the seminary he entered the Society of Jesus in 1586 and gave himself to preaching.¹The Jesuit historian Diego Yūki, writing of the twenty-six martyrs, says Miki was "educated as a boy in the Jesuit schools of Azuchi and Takatsuki", that he was close to ordination when he died, and that he was "the best preacher in the country".¹²The Azuchi classrooms had done their work. In December 1596 he was arrested in Osaka under Hideyoshi's persecution, taken on foot to Kyushu with the others, and crucified on the hill of Nishizaka in Nagasaki on 5 February 1597. Pope Pius IX canonised the twenty-six martyrs in 1862.¹Another pupil was a local boy, Nicholas Keian Fukunaga, born in 1569 in Ōmi, the province of Azuchi itself. What is known for certain of his youth, the Jesuit Fuyuki Hirabayashi writes, is that he studied at the seminary in Azuchi.⁴He entered the Society of Jesus in 1588, at eighteen.⁴

Nicholas was nobody's idea of a star. His superiors' reports to Rome rated him "ordinary". He was never ordained, and he was not allowed to take his final vows until he was fifty. But he could preach: the early reports say "he is able to preach", the later ones "he preaches powerful sermons in Japanese".⁴In 1633 he was taken and hung in the pit at Nagasaki. His jailers asked him whether there was nothing in his life he regretted. "Yes," he answered. "I regret very much that I was unable to lead all the Japanese, beginning with the shogun, to Christ." He died on the morning of his third day in the pit, 31 July 1633, the feast of St Ignatius.⁴The official record of the martyrs compiled at Macau gave him his last report: "He continued to preach Christ to the Japanese officials to the very end, and his martyrdom was his most powerful sermon of all."⁴He was beatified in 2008.⁴

In June 1582 Nobunaga was killed at the Honnōji in Kyoto. Akechi Mitsuhide's troops overran Azuchi, and the seminary's fine building was left in ruins with the castle.¹It had stood at Azuchi a little over two years.¹

The school did not die with it. The boys moved to Kyoto, then to Takatsuki, Ukon's town, and then to Osaka. When Hideyoshi issued his edict against the missionaries in 1587, the seminary was joined to the one at Arima in Hizen. It closed at last in 1614, under the Tokugawa expulsion.¹

The site, or part of what is thought to be the site, is now a small park on the old outer moat of Azuchi castle, about fifteen minutes on foot from JR Azuchi station.⁶⁷It is free to visit.⁷On 31 May 1981, when relics of St Paul Miki were brought to this place, a second stone was set up to remember him and his school.¹

Azuchi was the brief moment when Japan's most powerful man let the Church build in the shadow of his own castle, under his own blue tiles. Two years later the castle was gone. What lasted was the school, carried from town to town by its teachers and its boys, and two of its boys: Paul Miki, who died on a cross at Nagasaki, and the "ordinary" Nicholas Fukunaga, who preached from the pit. Four centuries later his relics came home to Azuchi.