The door on the hill
Shortly after noon on Friday 17 March 1865, a group of twelve to fifteen men, women and children was standing at the entrance of the new Church of the Twenty-Six Martyrs on the hill at , in Nagasaki. Father noticed them. They did not look like ordinary sightseers. The door was shut, so he went down, opened it and walked toward the sanctuary. They followed him in.
He knelt before the tabernacle. "I adored him," he wrote later, "and begged him to put on my lips words that would touch their hearts." He had barely had time to say an Our Father when three women of fifty or sixty came and knelt close beside him. One of them put her hand on her breast and spoke very quietly, as if afraid the walls might hear: "The heart of all of us here is the same as yours."
— « Notre cœur à nous tous, qui sommes ici, est le même que le vôtre. »
— « Vraiment ! répond-il. Mais d’où êtes-vous donc ? »
— « Nous sommes tous d’Urakami. À Urakami presque tous ont le même cœur que nous. »
— « Sancta Maria no gozowa doko ? — Où est l’image de Sainte Marie ? »
"A woman of about 40 or 50 years old approached me and, with her hands pressed to her breast, said, ‘Our hearts are the same as yours. . . . Where is the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary?’ At the sacred name of the Virgin, all my doubts left me. I knew that I was in the presence of the descendants of the ancient Christians of Japan."
"Really?" he answered. "But where are you from?"
"We are all from Urakami. In Urakami almost everyone has the same heart as us." And then, at once: "Sancta Maria no gozō wa doko?" Where is the image of Holy Mary?
At that name, Petitjean wrote, he had no more doubt. He was standing in front of the descendants of the old Christians of Japan.
This page asks a simple question with a complicated answer. How did two strangers, a French priest and a Japanese farming woman, each recognise the other as the real thing, when one wrong word could have sent a whole village to prison? The answer is in what they asked each other in the next few minutes, and in what the villagers had been carrying for 250 years.
? How do we know? the words at the door
- Petitjean wrote two letters about the day, on 18 and 22 March. Marnas printed both, combined, in 1897.
- The Japan Tourism Agency quotes the letter of 18 March in English.
- Petitjean wrote the woman’s question in romanized Japanese: "Sancta Maria no gozowa doko?" Oratio gives it as "Santa Maria gozo wa doko?"
- His day-by-day journal burned in the Yokohama mission fire of 1874. The letters he sent to Paris in journal form survive in the seminary archives, and Marnas worked from them.
A church built to be found
Japan had banned Christianity in 1614, and the last priest in the country had been killed in 1644. 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. Foreigners in the settlements were allowed to worship.
Rome had already given Japan to the (the MEP, from its French name) in 1838. After the ports opened, its priest came to as interpreter to the French consul general. reached Nagasaki in 1863, and Bernard Petitjean soon followed. 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. Its official name honoured the Twenty-Six Martyrs who had been crucified at in 1597.
On paper the church was for foreigners. Locals called it the "French temple." But Petitjean had the Japanese word , "church of the Lord of Heaven," set over the door, where any Japanese passer-by could read it. The missionaries' real hope was to find the hidden Christians of the Nagasaki region. The sign was a message in a bottle. It took about a month to be answered.
Ōura church: as built, and today
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.
Testing the stranger
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!" Then the questions came quickly. They spoke of , Jesus Sama, Sancta Maria Sama, the old names their grandparents had used for God, Christ and Mary.
« Oui, c’est bien Sancta Maria ! [s’écrient-ils à la vue de la statue de Notre-Dame.] Voyez sur son bras On ko Jesus Sama, son auguste fils Jésus ! »
"Yes, it is Sancta Maria! Look, on her arm, her noble son Jesus!"
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 . Do you have these feasts too?"
« Nous faisons la fête de On Aruji Jesus Sama le 25e jour du shimo tsuki. On nous a enseigné que ce jour-là, vers minuit, il est né dans une étable […]. En ce moment nous sommes au temps de la tristesse (kanashimi no setsu). Avez-vous aussi ces solennités ? »
« Oui, répond M. Petitjean, nous sommes aujourd’hui au 17e jour de kanashimi no setsu. »
"We keep the feast of the Lord Jesus on the 25th day of the frost month. We were taught that on that day, about midnight, he was born in a stable [...]. Just now we are in the time of sorrow. Do you have these feasts too?" / "Yes. Today is the seventeenth day of the time of sorrow."
"Yes," Petitjean answered. "Today is the seventeenth day of the time of sorrow." He had understood that they meant Lent. They asked about Saint Joseph too, "the adoptive father of the Lord Jesus."
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 , handed down by a catechist called . 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." The meeting could not last. Petitjean sent them home before the officers came, and made them promise to return.
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The Virgin of the Discovery 信徒発見のマリア像
- What: A small statue of Mary holding the Child Jesus
- From: Brought from France by Petitjean
- Where now: The right-hand altar of Ōura, as you face the front
- Not to confuse with: the white outdoor statue at the entrance, Nihon no Seibo, ordered from France the year after the discovery
The statue and the woman
The statue the villagers asked for still stands at the right-hand altar of Ōura, as you face the front of the church. Petitjean had brought it from France. , the society's historian, calls it "the little statue of Our Lady with the Child Jesus." Today it is known as the Virgin of the Discovery (信徒発見のマリア像).
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 , the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy, holding a child. When people were interrogated in the 1850s, officials wrote down that their principal image was "," that is, Santa Maria. 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. Her name came to light later. The Nagasaki prefectural tourism feature says that 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. The historian , 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: , a midwife of Urakami, born in 1813. That would make her about fifty-one, which fits Marnas better than the "about 40 or 50" of the Japan Tourism Agency text (). The Renaut diary itself we have not seen ().
? How do we know? the name Sugimoto Yuri
- Petitjean did not name her. Marnas, who printed his letters, describes "three women of fifty to sixty".
- The name is said to be in a diary by Father Renaut, newly arrived in 1865, kept at the Sulpician seminary in Fukuoka. We have not seen this diary (Unverified).
- The reference work Nihon jinmei daijiten credits the historian Kataoka Yakichi with the identification and gives 1813 to 1893.
- The Furusu play is narrated by a descendant of the Sugimoto family, so the name also lives on in family memory (Tradition).
A week of crowds
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. Petitjean kept a journal in the form of letters to Paris, and Marnas quotes it day by day.
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.
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. 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." Three or four men followed Laucaigne home and asked him to remember their names: "Petoro, Paolo, Jiwano and Domingo."
« Pour le signe de la croix nous le faisons ainsi. »
« À Urakami, tous ne nous ressemblent pas. Il y a des espions du gouvernement qui nous observent ; et parmi ceux qui ont le même cœur, quelques-uns sont peu instruits. »
"For the sign of the cross, we make it like this." / "In Urakami not everyone is like us. There are government spies watching us, and among those with the same heart some know very little."
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." They were giving the priests the one thing they had kept most carefully: their baptismal names.
« Nous reviendrons, mon mari, mes enfants et moi un autre jour. En attendant, priez pour nous. Souvenez-vous, s’il vous plaît, de nos noms : mon mari s’appelle Paolo, mon fils qui est ici Petoro, et moi je me nomme Marina. »
"We will come back another day, my husband, my children and I. Meanwhile, pray for us. Please remember our names: my husband is Paolo, my son here is Petoro, and I am Marina."
On Thursday 23 March the priests met one of the men, , at a secret rendezvous on above the city. 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. The parish of Tsuwano, writing from Petitjean's report to Girard, identifies the baptiser as , the only (baptiser) to survive the crackdown of 1856. 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. 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. 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. 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." 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. 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.
What the discovery set in motion
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. 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."
« Peut-être sera-t-il prudent que vous teniez secrets ces détails. Ici, nous n’avons pas osé en faire part à nos Européens, dans la crainte qu’ils n’arrivent par eux aux oreilles des Japonais. »
"Perhaps it would be wise for you to keep these details secret. Here we have not dared to tell our Europeans, for fear it might reach Japanese ears through them."
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 , the Discovery of the Christians.
It also split the hidden communities. Some returned to the Catholic Church. Some, later called , kept the forms their ancestors had kept. Others turned to Buddhism or Shinto.
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. 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. At dawn on 15 July 1867 the magistrate's men raided all four chapels and took sixty-eight people. The fourth Urakami crackdown, the , had begun. It would end with the whole village sent into exile.
? How do we know? the secret chapels
- The four chapels and the raid of 15 July 1867 come from the Urakami parish history.
- Their names and present districts (Ōhashi-machi, Hashiguchi-machi, Tsuji-machi) come from the prefectural feature, which says monuments were put up for the centenary.
- The April 1867 funerals without the temple priest: Tsuwano parish and Archbishop Takami.
The question that is still asked
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. 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.
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