"Where Is Santa Maria?": The Discovery of the Hidden Christians, 17 March 1865

Japan had banned Christianity in 1614, and the last priest in the country had been killed in 1644.⁸ But in 1854 the shogunate signed its first treaty with the United States, and from 1859 it opened five ports to foreign trade, among them Nagasaki, where a foreign settlement was laid out.² Foreigners in the settlements were allowed to worship.⁴

Rome had already given Japan to the Paris Foreign Missions Society (the MEP, from its French name) in 1838. After the ports opened, its priest Prudence Girard came to Yokohama as interpreter to the French consul general. Louis Furet reached Nagasaki in 1863, and Bernard Petitjean soon followed.² Together they built a church on the slope at Ōura, completed on 29 December 1864 (Nagasaki City's Nagazine says November 1864: Disputed) and dedicated on 19 February 1865.¹²²⁴ Its official name honoured the Twenty-Six Martyrs who had been crucified at Nishizaka in 1597.⁴

On paper the church was for foreigners. Locals called it the "French temple." But Petitjean had the Japanese word tenshudō, "church of the Lord of Heaven," set over the door, where any Japanese passer-by could read it.⁴² The missionaries' real hope was to find the hidden Christians of the Nagasaki region.² The sign was a message in a bottle. It took about a month to be answered.⁴

Ōura church: as built, and today

18642018

Ōura church as first built: Unknown photographer, Public domain. Commons
Ōura Cathedral today: Houjyou-Minori, CC0. Commons

By the day of the discovery Furet had left, and Petitjean was working with a younger colleague, Joseph-Marie Laucaigne.¹¹⁶

The villagers were not only answering questions. They were asking them.

Petitjean led them to the altar of the Virgin. They knelt and tried to pray, but joy got the better of them. "Yes, it is Sancta Maria!" they cried. "Look, on her arm, her noble son Jesus!"¹ Then the questions came quickly. They spoke of Deus Sama, Jesus Sama, Sancta Maria Sama, the old names their grandparents had used for God, Christ and Mary.¹

The small statue of Mary with the Child reminded them of Christmas. "We keep the feast of the Lord Jesus on the 25th day of the frost month," one of them said, meaning the eleventh month of the old calendar. "We were taught that on that day, about midnight, he was born in a stable, that he grew up in poverty and suffering, and that at thirty-three he died on the cross for the salvation of our souls. Just now we are in the time of sorrow. Do you have these feasts too?"¹

"Yes," Petitjean answered. "Today is the seventeenth day of the time of sorrow." He had understood that they meant Lent.¹ They asked about Saint Joseph too, "the adoptive father of the Lord Jesus."¹

It was a careful exchange on both sides. The villagers were checking the priest against what they had kept: a calendar of feasts, the names of God and Mary, the shape of the Christmas story. The calendar they followed had been converted from the year 1634 into the lunar calendar and was, by Tradition, handed down by a catechist called Bastian.⁵⁹ Its feasts were exactly what they were now testing him on. For his part, Petitjean was listening for signs that these were not just curious visitors, or spies. Mary's name settled it for him. The feast days settled it for them.

Then footsteps sounded at the door. In a blink the group scattered. A moment later they came back laughing at their fright. "They are people from our village," they said. "They have the same heart as us."¹ The meeting could not last. Petitjean sent them home before the officers came, and made them promise to return.¹

Object spotlight

The Virgin of the Discovery 信徒発見のマリア像

• What: A small statue of Mary holding the Child Jesus¹
• From: Brought from France by Petitjean⁴
• Where now: The right-hand altar of Ōura, as you face the front⁴
• Not to confuse with: the white outdoor statue at the entrance, Nihon no Seibo, ordered from France the year after the discovery¹⁰

Open the object page: The Statue of Santa Maria at Ōura →

The statue the villagers asked for still stands at the right-hand altar of Ōura, as you face the front of the church.⁴ Petitjean had brought it from France.⁴ Marnas, the society's historian, calls it "the little statue of Our Lady with the Child Jesus."¹ Today it is known as the Virgin of the Discovery (信徒発見のマリア像).⁴

The villagers were not seeing a Christian statue for the first time in their lives in quite the way it might seem. For generations they had prayed in secret before Chinese porcelain figures of Kannon, the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy, holding a child. When Urakami people were interrogated in the 1850s, officials wrote down that their principal image was "Hantamaruya," that is, Santa Maria.⁵ So the question "Where is Santa Maria?" was not a test the priest could fail by having the wrong kind of statue. It was a question about the one figure they already loved.

Who was the woman who spoke? Petitjean did not write down her name; his account, as Marnas prints it, describes three women of fifty to sixty.¹ Her name came to light later. The Nagasaki prefectural tourism feature says that Father Jules Renaut recorded it in a diary now kept at the Sulpician seminary in Fukuoka. Renaut, born in 1852, served in Nagasaki only from 1875, so this was a record made about ten years after the event, not on the day.¹⁰¹⁴ The historian Kataoka Yakichi, whom the reference Nihon jinmei daijiten credits with the identification, says the diary settled that the words were Yuri's, not those of her sister Clara Teru, to whom many had credited them: Isabelina Sugimoto Yuri, a midwife of Urakami, born in 1813.¹⁰¹¹¹⁵ That would make her about fifty-one, which fits Marnas better than the "about 40 or 50" of the Japan Tourism Agency text (Disputed).¹² The Renaut diary itself is Unverified.

The news went from cottage to cottage in Urakami that evening. From the next morning the villagers came in such numbers that the police noticed.¹ Petitjean kept a journal in the form of letters to Paris, and Marnas quotes it day by day.¹

On Saturday 18 March, groups came from ten in the morning until dark, and Japanese officers came by every quarter of an hour. An old man of seventy-six and two women of about his age begged to venerate the crucifix. The old man recited Latin prayers that Petitjean could not quite catch.¹

On Sunday 19 March, the feast of Saint Joseph, some of them stayed through Mass. Petitjean tried to teach a few the sign of the cross. "We make it like this," one said, and signed his forehead and breast with his right thumb. Marnas notes that this was the Spanish and Portuguese way, kept from the old missionaries.¹ The same man gave a warning: "In Urakami not everyone is like us. There are government spies watching us, and among those with the same heart some know very little."¹ Three or four men followed Laucaigne home and asked him to remember their names: "Petoro, Paolo, Jiwano and Domingo."¹

On Monday a mother said: "We will come back another day, my husband, my children and I. Pray for us. My husband is Paolo, my son here is Petoro, and I am Marina."¹ They were giving the priests the one thing they had kept most carefully: their baptismal names.

On Thursday 23 March the priests met one of the men, Tokuzō of Ipponki, at a secret rendezvous on Mount Konpira above the city.^6b He told them what they most needed to know. Baptism had never stopped in Urakami. When a child was born, they called the person in the neighbourhood who knew how to baptise. That was how his wife had received the name Virginia, his son Thomas and his daughter Isabérina.¹ The parish of Tsuwano, writing from Petitjean's report to Girard, identifies the baptiser as Iwanaga Mataichi, the only mizukata (baptiser) to survive the crackdown of 1856.⁷ Tokuzō was not himself a baptiser. The baptiser, whom Petitjean calls Domingo, came to the church on 8 April, and Laucaigne snatched a moment to ask how he gave the sacrament: he made the sign of the cross with his right thumb on the child's forehead, mouth and breast and poured water on its head, face and body, invoking the three Persons of the Trinity.¹ The full answer came on Easter Tuesday, 18 April. "At ten in the morning we are in the mountains at the meeting we have longed for this past month," Petitjean wrote. Two old women showed the priests the paths that would hide them from prying eyes, young men kept watch, and in a clump of pines Domingo was waiting with three or four relatives and friends. Only the fear of compromising "our holy cause," he told them, had kept him from coming often to the church.¹ His formula, as Marnas prints it, was "Kono hitowo paoti'zo in nomne Patero, Hilio, et S'ra Spiritou Sancto." The word ego was missing, as it often is in Japanese, and kono hito, "this person," stood for te. The priests held it valid, and Domingo promised to use from then on the words they wrote out for him, repeating them in front of them.¹ He said he was the only baptiser left in the valley, and that his son, a young man of twenty-five, would take his place. He told them how the faith was kept: every day each family prayed together, the father leading one week, the mother the next, then each child in turn; they gathered to pray at a deathbed, and for eight days after a death they begged St Peter to open the gates of paradise. He recited the Salve Regina in Japanese and handed over the only book of doctrine he had, Tenchi no hajimari no koto, "Of the Beginning of Heaven and Earth."¹ Petitjean's letter as Marnas quotes it names him only Domingo; the Urakami parish history calls him Domingo Mataichi and the parish of Tsuwano names the baptiser as Iwanaga Mataichi.^6b7 Back on 23 March, an officer had asked one old woman, Iwana, what the statue was that she seemed to be praying to. "Alas, sirs," she said, "how could a poor woman like me explain it?" and began admiring everything in the church as if she were a pagan.¹

Petitjean wrote two letters about 17 March, one on the 18th to Girard, the superior of the mission, and one on the 22nd to the directors of the seminary in Paris.¹ He asked Paris to keep the details secret. "Here we have not dared to tell our Europeans," he wrote, "for fear it might reach Japanese ears."¹

In Europe, where people had assumed that the persecution had wiped out Japan's Christians, the news caused amazement. The event came to be called shinto hakken, the Discovery of the Christians.²

It also split the hidden communities. Some returned to the Catholic Church. Some, later called Kakure Kirishitan, kept the forms their ancestors had kept. Others turned to Buddhism or Shinto.²⁵

For Urakami the joy was short. Over the next two years the villagers built four secret chapels, where the priests slipped in at night to teach, baptise and say Mass.⁶ In April 1867 families began burying their dead without the temple priest, and most of the village told the headman they wanted to cut their tie with the temple.⁷ At dawn on 15 July 1867 the magistrate's men raided all four chapels and took sixty-eight people.⁶ The fourth Urakami crackdown, the Yonban Kuzure, had begun. It would end with the whole village sent into exile.

In 2015, on the eve of the 150th anniversary, the Nagasaki prefectural heritage site retold the scene and noted that it is sometimes called a miracle of world religious history. Ōura marked the day with a series of Masses.³ Whatever one makes of that, the scene has lasted because of its smallness. No one preached. A farming woman asked where Mary was, a priest showed her, and both understood.

The statue is still there. Visitors to Ōura can stand where the villagers knelt.⁴