Story
A stone stair in Nagasaki
Between the public prosecutor's office and the legal affairs bureau in central there is a flight of stone steps, and beside it a marker. The Pauline Sisters' guide to Christian sites, Laudate, explains what stood there. In 1583 a Japanese Christian named Justino and his wife Justa founded the Misericórdia, the "house of mercy," with a hospital and homes for orphans and the old. It survived the persecution of 1614 longer than any other Christian building in the city, and was destroyed only in 1620; afterwards people still remembered it as the Jihiya, the house of mercy.
This page is about the brotherhoods that grew from that idea. The historian Gonoi Takashi of the University of Tokyo, writing in the Proceedings of the Japan Academy, sums up why they matter: in November 1614 ninety-nine missionaries, two thirds of the total, were banished, leaving forty-five in hiding; it was the confraternities of mercy and devotion that helped those few priests, and in their place cared for and led the Christian communities. In the harsh ban of two and a half centuries, he writes, "the role the kumi played in keeping the faith of the was great."
The Portuguese model
The Misericórdia was a Portuguese invention. The historian João Paulo Oliveira e Costa explains that the brotherhoods of mercy were founded at the end of the fifteenth century under the patronage of Queen Eleanor, and spread through Portugal and its empire from Brazil to . Elsewhere in Asia their members were mostly Europeans. Japan, Costa notes, was the only overseas country where all the members of these confraternities were local people.
Their work was set out in the Christian teaching itself. Gonoi points out that the catechism taught the "seven corporal works of mercy" and the "seven spiritual works of mercy," and that the brotherhoods existed to carry them out: to feed the hungry, visit the sick, bury the dead, counsel the doubtful and comfort the sorrowful.
The first brotherhoods
The first were born of necessity. In 1558, Gonoi writes, when the lord of , Matsura Takanobu, expelled Father , the priest named seven leading Christians as jihiyakusha, "officers of mercy," members of the Misericórdia; every Sunday they looked after the Christians at the church and buried the dead. Similar brotherhoods, led by four mordomos, were set up in the lands of the Christian lord Antonio Koteda, on Takushima, and the west coast of Hirado.Costa adds that in Hirado the officers were elected by the whole community, not only by the brothers.
The next year, under Father , a brotherhood of twelve was founded at in Bungo to run the new hospital, so that Brother , who had led the medical work, could give himself to preaching.Costa notes that the Funai brotherhood later took the same rules as Lisbon's.
In , when the missionaries were driven out in 1565, the Christians kept their community together for three years and eight months under a former Buddhist monk of Sakai named Tomé, until returned.At Takatsuki, Gonoi records, the Christian lord Dario Takayama Tomoteru founded a Misericórdia, served as its head, and chose four mordomos each year to convert unbelievers, visit the poor, bury the dead, prepare the feasts and receive guests.In Hakata, Fróis described two old men, "very good Christians," who were "like brothers of the Misericórdia" and went about visiting the sick with counsel and alms.
The house of mercy at Nagasaki
Nagasaki's Misericórdia was founded in 1583.The brotherhood sent members to Macao that year, Gonoi writes, to bring back the rules and banner of the Portuguese Misericórdia there, and ran itself by those rules. It had a head, the provedor, and a hundred brothers, and kept as its feast the Visitation of Our Lady on 2 July. (Costa adds that in 1602 its officials told the Jesuit General their confraternity had begun thirty-two years before, so a brotherhood in the Japanese style seems to have come with the town itself, and took the Macao statutes later.) The members took part in funerals and in the Corpus Christi procession, and collected alms for the poor, widows, orphans, the sick and the needy. A women's Misericórdia began in 1585.
The town passed out of Jesuit hands in 1587, but the brotherhood went on growing. By 1590 it had 120 members and three hospices; it then restored and ran the St Lazarus hospital for lepers outside the town, and in 1603 built and managed the hospital of Santiago for the sick.Costa describes its church, enlarged in 1608 in Japanese style with a clock tower, and notes that the brotherhood seems to have been run by Nagasaki's own leading citizens, not by the Portuguese.
The kumi
From the 1590s a second kind of brotherhood spread. These were confraternities more concerned with prayer than with charity, and the Christians called them kumi, "groups."Gonoi finds the word first in the Jesuit annual report for 1592, and in the reports for 1594 and 1595 confraternities of the Immaculate Conception, which the Christians called kumi, had begun in many places.In 1603 a confraternity of the Annunciation was founded at the among the catechists; another followed in Nagasaki.
By 1611 Nagasaki, the "Rome of Japan," had confraternities of the Rosary, of Our Lady of the Assumption (which Costa says grew to more than nine thousand members), of the Blessed Sacrament and of St Michael; a group of the leading women visited the sick women of the city; and in 1610 the Korean Christians of Nagasaki, brought to Japan in 's wars, built their own church of St Lawrence and formed their own brotherhood.The friars founded theirs too: the Franciscan Luis Sotelo's confraternity of the Stigmata of St Francis in Edo in 1610, and the Dominicans' confraternity of the Rosary in Nagasaki from 1609.
Brotherhoods without priests
When the ban came, the brotherhoods were ready. Costa quotes the Jesuit annual letter of 15 March 1616: most of the brotherhoods had been reorganised before the priests went into exile, and their officers had been authorised to baptise where there were no priests. They received alms, took care of funerals and organised meetings for instruction.
The confraternities paid in blood. In the Great Martyrdom of September 1622, when fifty-five people were put to death at Nagasaki, Gonoi notes that of the thirty-four victims who were not missionaries, twenty-one were members of the Rosary confraternity.These were not anonymous followers. Gonoi describes the members of the Dominican Rosary confraternity and its companion confraternity of the Holy Name of Jesus as the ones who boldly went ahead as guides for the friars.The Jesuits reorganised their own groups under the persecution, with names that told the times: the confraternity of the Martyrs, of St Ignatius, of Jesus, of the Holy Spirit.
A memorandum of 1618 by the vice-provincial Jerónimo Rodrigues on the confraternity of the Assumption shows how they worked. A small group had about fifty members or households; about ten small groups formed a large group of five or six hundred; and the large groups of a district formed a general group. Each level had its head, and there was a treasurer of mercy, one or two representatives, and officers who carried out the works of mercy.In 1617, a set of seventy-six signed declarations from leading Christians in fifteen provinces shows the same pattern, from Yufuin in Bungo to Kōtsūra in Higo.
Chōkata and mizukata
By the end of the 1630s the last priests in hiding were gone.The kumi remained. Gonoi traces the line directly: the hidden Christians of Nagasaki, and kept their faith under three officers, the ochōyaku or , the sazukeyaku or , and the kikiyaku.The chōkata kept the chō, the church calendar, working out each year's feasts and days of abstinence from the last calendar made by a missionary, the one of 1634 remembered as 's calendar; the baptised; the kikiyaku went from house to house each week with the days to keep.On Ikitsuki and Hirado the offices had other names, and the Amakusa Christians kept a "little group," a companhia, until they were discovered in 1805.
The Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture tells the same story on its panels: the missionaries, knowing there were too few of them, formed the Misericórdia, which cared for the sick and the poor, and the confraria, which strengthened the faith; these groups "helped to support the faith of the Hidden Christians after all the missionaries were banned."
Our The Keepers page follows these offices at Urakami: a single chōkata for the whole village, chosen by election, a mizukata in each of its four districts, and a kikiyaku in each hamlet. In 1839 the chōkata Rigorō was arrested; in 1856 the chōkata Kichizō and most of the leaders were imprisoned. Nine years later the French priests at met the people of Urakami, and one of the first things they had to deal with was the baptisms the mizukata had given.The faith they found had been handed on, generation after generation, by the officers of a lay brotherhood.
The brotherhoods that had begun with seven officers of mercy at Hirado had carried the Church through two hundred and fifty years without a priest.