Two friends at Urakami
The parish history tells the story this way. After the church of Santa Clara in Urakami was destroyed, a man called Magoemon, who had worked there as doorkeeper and cook, went on living in a wood in Nakano, on the spot where 's little house, the , stands today.As the ban tightened, people stopped speaking about the faith even to neighbours they knew had once been Christians. Magoemon was afraid the Christians would die out.
What they built had three offices.
- A , one for all Urakami, chosen by election. He held the hiyori or , the church calendar known as "'s calendar," worked out from it the feasts and fast days of the year, and handed down the prayers and teaching.
- A , one in each of the four districts, who passed on what the chōkata sent and who baptised.
- A kikiyaku, one in each smaller hamlet, who knew every Christian household and carried the word to each one.
The first chōkata was Magoemon. The office was elective, but for seven generations his descendants were the ones chosen.The parish history counts this system as one of the reasons the faith survived for 250 years without a single priest, and notes that , , and had similar organisations.
Older than the ban
The idea did not start in hiding. In the Christian century the missionaries organised lay brotherhoods, confraria. Miyazaki Kentarō dates the first, a charitable misericordia, to in 1554; it was followed by groups of Santa Maria, the Sacrament, the Rosary and the martyrs, each with its own officers and rules. Among those officers, already, were a chōkata, "keeper of the books," and elders.The Japan Tourism Agency's text also traces the hidden organisations to the misericordia and the confraria.
While there were priests, the brotherhoods supported mutual help and devotion. When the last priest was gone, Miyazaki writes, they "became an indispensable means for the transmission of doctrine and rituals." Prefecture's text says the same in its own terms: the communities kept the kumi (groups) rooted in each settlement, and changed them so that leaders such as the mizukata, who baptised in place of missionaries, and the chōkata, who kept the church calendar, carried out the Christian rites.
The book, the water and the word
Across the region the names change, but the three jobs do not. Miyazaki lists them:
The water. Baptism, Miyazaki argues, was the rite that held the communities together, and so the baptiser's office was in a sense the highest. It carried the most taboos.On Ikitsuki in his fieldwork, the ojiyaku could not have marital relations; bathed first; had his washing done separately, with his own towel, basin and soap; avoided handling cattle or manure, and would not hold a baby in case it wet him. Before a baptism he stripped and poured cold water over himself, did not dry himself with a towel, and was handed his baptismal kimono by his wife while still wet.Miyazaki traces this idea of pollution to Japanese folk belief, not to Christianity.
The word. The kikiyaku or yakuchū were the network: on Ikitsuki the branch groups chose one by rotation, and with experience a man could rise to a higher office.
What it cost
The system worked because it was invisible. When it was found, it was the officers who suffered.
At Urakami in 1839 the chōkata Rigorō, of Nakano, was arrested with other leaders after an informer's report.In the third crackdown of 1856 the chōkata Kichizō and most of the leaders were imprisoned and tortured. Their statements to the magistrate, with an outline of their teaching and of the year's feasts by Bastian's calendar, are, the parish history says, a key to what the hidden Christian life really was.Kichizō died in prison, and his son Rihachi was banished. The office that had passed down seven generations from Magoemon was never filled again.Of the four mizukata, only Domingo of Hira in Motohara survived.(The parish history also dates Kichizō's arrest to 1859 in one place: ; see Urakami.)
The magistrate's officers listed what Kichizō kept: the calendar, "a standing white porcelain Buddha called ," a bronze seated figure called "Inassho" and an engraved ring-like object called "Jizōsu." The parish history reads these as Santa Maria, St Ignatius and Jesus, the Portuguese names worn down by two centuries of speech.
When the priests came back
Nine years later the French priests at met the people of Urakami. One of the first things they had to deal with was the work of the mizukata. Because of doubts about the wording used in the old baptisms, the parish history says, Father Poirier, Urakami's first parish priest after 1873, spent much of his time giving conditional baptism again.
Most hidden Christians joined the Catholic Church in the late nineteenth century. Some communities kept the old organisation and the old rites; they are the people now called .In them the offices continued. Miyazaki, around 2000, describes a chōkata or oyajiyaku who enshrines the community's sacred object in his house and leads most rites, while baptisms had largely stopped, so the mizukata had lost importance.
On 3 November 2025, at Karematsu Shrine in Sotome, where the hidden Christians venerate San Jiwan, said to be Bastian's teacher, about thirty people gathered for the 26th San Jiwan festival. Murakami Shigenori, aged seventy-five, the chōkata of the community, recited the for about thirty minutes. He said the Kurosaki community numbers about forty.
The thread
For two hundred years the Church in Japan had no clergy, and it did not need a building. It needed a man who could count the days, a man who could pour the water with the right words, and a man who knew every door. On 14 March 1965 a stone marking where the chōkata's house had stood was blessed and unveiled in front of the Nyokodō.