The first Japanese priests of the modern era, 1882

On the last day of 1882 Ōura Church in Nagasaki was full. The Nagasaki tourism guide, drawing on the mission's own memory, says three thousand Christians packed the church to see it.¹At the altar Bishop Bernard Petitjean, who had found the hidden Christians in that same church seventeen years before, laid his hands on three young Japanese men and made them priests.²³⁴The Bishops' Conference of Japan records the day in a single line: "Three Japanese priests ordained: the first since the re-opening of Japan."²The Archdiocese of Nagasaki counts them as the first graduates of its seminary.³

Their names were Fukahori Tatsuemon, Takagi Gentarō and Ariyasu Hidenoshin.¹⁵Behind them lay seventeen years of patience, a flight overseas and the exile of their families. This page tells how the Church in Japan began again to have its own priests.

The hope was not new. The Jesuits of the sixteenth century had wanted Japanese priests for Japan. On 22 September 1601, in the church of Our Lady of the Assumption in Nagasaki, Sebastião Kimura and Luis Niabara were ordained, the first Japanese priests ever.⁶Others followed. Petro Kasui Kibe, refused ordination at Macao, travelled overland to Rome and was ordained there in 1620; Konishi Mansho came home a priest in 1632. Kibe died a martyr in Edo in 1639; Mansho, whom the reference works call the last priest left in Japan, died in 1644 (the phrase "last priest" is Disputed), and with him the old Japanese priesthood ended.⁶For two and a half centuries afterwards the hidden Christians of western Kyushu lived without priests. Lay officers kept the faith alive: in Sotome and the Gotō islands the chōkata kept the calendar of feasts and led most of the rites, and the mizukata baptised; baptism, our page on the hidden Christians notes, was what kept the community going.¹⁷They also kept, in the tradition known as the Bastian prophecy, the hope that priests would one day come back by sea. (Tradition.)²⁰

On 17 March 1865 three women from Urakami knelt beside Petitjean in the new church at Ōura. "The heart of all of us here is the same as yours," one of them whispered, and then asked: "Where is the image of Holy Mary?"¹⁸Her name, recorded about ten years later in the diary of Father Jules Renaut, was Isabelina Sugimoto Yuri, a midwife of Hamaguchi-machi.¹²The discovery changed everything for Petitjean, and it made the training of Japanese priests urgent: later discoveries, the New Catholic Encyclopedia says, revealed more than fifteen thousand such Christians in Kyushu.⁹Within weeks he was meeting the leaders of the hidden communities in secret.⁴At the end of 1865, our Petitjean page records, he quietly began teaching Japanese boys Latin in the attic of the priests' house at Ōura; the Archdiocese dates the founding of the seminary to December 1865.⁴³It was against the law. The ban on Christianity was still in force, and these were the sons of families the magistrate would soon arrest.

In July 1867 the magistrate's men raided the secret chapels of Urakami, and in 1868 the new Meiji government ordered the Christians of the village into exile.⁷On 20 July 1868 Father Jules Cousin watched 114 of the leaders taken aboard ship under armed guard. "We saw them," he wrote. "They could see us, and our hearts understood each other. Their eyes were turned to the cross of the church, which they greeted with a look of farewell."⁸

Petitjean would not wait for the persecutors to seize his seminarians. The next day, 21 July, he sent all ten of them, boys already separated from parents gone into exile, to the college of the Paris Foreign Missions at Penang, in Malaya, in the charge of Father Cousin.⁸Cousin got them away on a European steamer, changed ships at Shanghai and brought them safely to Penang.⁸The New Catholic Encyclopedia tells the same story from the Society's side: the Paris Foreign Missions, "always specially intent on training candidates for the priesthood," sent ten Japanese seminarians to Penang in 1868 at the outbreak of persecution, and once it had ceased they returned to Japan.⁹

The college at Penang was the Collège général, which IRFA, the Society's archive, describes as the seminary of the Paris Foreign Missions for future priests from the different countries of Asia, founded on the island in 1809.¹⁹There the boys from Urakami studied far from their families, who had been scattered across the domains of western Japan.¹⁹⁷Cousin meant to return at once, but the death of a director kept him at Penang until early 1869.⁸

In 1871 Petitjean moved his residence to Yokohama and took Father Marc de Rotz with him; de Rotz's first task was to fit out a dormitory in the attic for seminarians just back from Penang.¹⁰The exile was long. The Bishops' Conference chronology records that in January 1870 more than three thousand Urakami Christians were arrested and sent to twenty-one domains; the boards proscribing Christianity were abolished on 24 February 1873, and on 14 March 1873 the Urakami Christians were released.²They came home to find their houses gone.²¹The IRFA chronology records for 1873 "the inauguration of the Nagasaki seminary and printing press."¹¹

De Rotz then built the seminary that still stands beside Ōura Church. He began at the end of 1873 and finished in October 1875, using, he said, only chosen materials, and guaranteeing its soundness.¹⁰In 1875 it had only five students and a single class in the evening; full courses began in October 1877.¹⁰The first head of the seminary for Japanese priests was Father Jules Alfred Renaut, who served in Nagasaki from 1875 to 1880.¹²The building, known as the former Latin Seminary, was designated an Important Cultural Property in 1972.¹³

Teaching was in Latin. Petitjean had already published a Latin-Japanese dictionary, the Lexicon latino-japonicum, in Rome in 1870.⁴On 17 December 1881 he blessed a great cross in the garden at Ōura to mark the ordination of three Japanese seminarians as deacons.⁴¹³A year later they were priests. The step from deacon to priest was the last of a long road: the attic, the voyage to Malaya, the dormitory in Yokohama, the new seminary on the hill, Latin, philosophy and theology, and the long wait for the bishop's word.

Of the three, the Urakami Cathedral parish lists two among the priests born in Urakami: Fukahori, whom it names 深堀達文, from Nakano no Tsuji, and Takagi Gentarō from Tsuji, both ordained on 31 December 1882.⁵They were sons of the village that had been sent into exile in 1868. The third, Ariyasu Hidenoshin, does not appear on the Urakami list; his birthplace is not given in our sources.⁵¹The Tsuzuki parish's history and the Nagasaki tourism guide both name the three together.¹⁴¹

Father Cousin, who had taken the ten boys to Penang, was there at their ordination. "It is the grace of God that has done everything," he wrote, "but it must have found faithful cooperators, first in the Christians who stayed faithful through so many trials, and also in the preachers God sent them."⁸

Petitjean did not have long to enjoy it. He died at Ōura on 7 October 1884.²His obituary records that before he died he had "the great consolation" of ordaining the first priests of the revived Church in Japan.⁴When he died, the Yokohama diocese's history notes, he had ordained the first Japanese priests since the reopening of the country.¹⁵

The three were the first of many. Helen Ballhatchet, in the Handbook of Christianity in Japan, records that priority was given to forming a Japanese clergy: twenty-three Japanese priests were ordained between 1882 and 1894, after fifteen years of training and a year of work as catechists, and most of them came from families that had held religious posts in the hidden communities, the sons of the baptizers and the keepers of the calendar.¹⁶In 1890 the first regional seminary for Japan was established at Nagasaki.⁹In 1876 Rome had divided Japan into two vicariates, with Petitjean in charge of the south and Bishop Laucaigne as his auxiliary, and in 1880 Petitjean moved the seat of the southern vicariate from Osaka back to Nagasaki, where his seminary was.²Bishop Cousin, Petitjean's successor, gave "the greater part of his heart," his obituary says, to the native clergy; he found eight Japanese priests and ordained forty.⁸

The Nagasaki tourism guide recalls Petitjean's joy, and says he sent the news to the Society's headquarters in Paris.¹

The line ran on. In 1927 Pius XI consecrated Januarius Hayasaka Kyūnosuke, the first Japanese bishop, for Nagasaki.⁶But it began on that winter day in 1882, when three sons of the hidden Christians stood at the altar of the church where their grandparents had asked the French priest, "Where is the image of Santa Maria?"