Neighbors made answerable for each other
The goningumi, or five-household group, was the smallest unit of village and town government in the Edo period. Groups of about five neighboring households were made jointly responsible for paying the rice tax and keeping the peace.The shogunate made the system general around 1633, in the Kan'ei era (1624 to 1644), and one of its stated purposes was the control of Christians (and of masterless samurai).Each group had a head, the goningumi-gashira, and its members signed a register, the goningumi-chō, swearing to keep the laws written in it.
The groups descended from the five-man groups Hideyoshi had set up among samurai and the ten-man groups (jūningumi) among farmers.In some towns, such as Nagasaki, they were made up of house-owners rather than tenants, and in some districts they had six households, or in at least one case ten.In the early Tokugawa years they were used to catch ordinary criminals and Osaka loyalists as well as Christians, and later their main work was finding Christians.An order of 1635 added that every person old enough to speak had to name two guarantors that he was not a Christian.In 1642 the groups were joined to the rewards for informers: if a member was denounced by his own group the other households were spared, "but if a member was accused by someone of another group all members of a five-family group were executed."
For the this meant that faith was never a private risk. The anti-Christian notice board of 1682, preserved in the Wakayama Prefectural Archives, promised rewards to informers: 500 pieces of silver for a priest, 300 for a brother or a lapsed Christian who had returned to the faith, 100 for a catechist or an ordinary believer. If a Christian was found to have been hidden, it warned, the village headman and the five-household group would be severely punished.The board was meant to make neighbors watch one another.
In some places the whole village shared the secret: at Shitsu in even the headman and the village officials were hidden Christians.
Hidden Christians could also form their own groups and so subvert the system.
The boards came down in 1873 Unverified.
Neighbors of the missionaries, 1616 to 1622
Long before the groups were made general, neighbors were made answerable for missionaries: by Hidetada's decree of September 1616, the nearest neighbors of anyone who sheltered a missionary, if they did not report him, were to lose their goods and be burned with the host's wife and children.In Nagasaki, placards after this edict made every household in a street's ten-family group answerable if one of them hid a priest.By 1617 even neighbors who failed to denounce a hider were condemned, and the least penalty was confiscation and ruin.That year, when the hosts Gaspar and Andrea were executed in Nagasaki, the goods of the eight families living next to them were seized and the heads of those families imprisoned, though one of them was not a Christian.In November and December 1618 the householders of Nagasaki signed again, through these groups: a host would be burned alive with his family, and the other households of his group beheaded.
After the arrests of December 1618, the seven neighbors of the host Cosme Takeya were taken to prison in Nagasaki, because they had pledged not to receive or let anyone receive a religious.Domingos Jorge, the other host, lived among the Portuguese and had no neighbors bound with him in this way.In late November 1619, eleven neighbors held jointly responsible with the hosts of missionaries were beheaded at Nagasaki together with Antonio Kimura.Six came from the street where Orsucci and Juan de Santo Domingo had been taken, four from Father de Mena's street and one from Father de Morales's.Not every group held firm in the same way: the groups of the hosts executed on November 18, 1619 gave martyrs from only twelve of their thirty households.
Jean Shu, also called Takaso, a neighbor held jointly responsible with the hosts of missionaries, was beheaded at Nagasaki in February 1621.A decree in force at Nagasaki that year said that any host of religious was to be burned alive and his neighbors put to death, and it was rumoured that their wives and children would share their fate.Under these laws, the missionaries reported, the heads of the ten families nearest a priest's hiding place were executed even if they knew nothing.Because of this, the priests had to live alone, in caves, woods and holes in the ground, or on boats dressed as sailors.One of those put to death in the great martyrdom of September 10, 1622 was Blessed Tomás Shichiro of Karatsu, aged seventy, who died as the father of a neighbor held jointly responsible, in place of his absent son.
From ten households to five
The ten-household group, an old Chinese technique, was unknown in Nagasaki before 1614, where the parish brotherhoods had done this work.In 1621 the groups were cut to five households living close together, after the new governor, Gonroku, arrived on July 29, 1621.He may have favoured the change because he disliked needless bloodshed, but smaller groups also made it easier to denounce the hosts, the yadonushi.The arrest of Antonio Korea, one of the 55 put to death on September 10, 1622, shows the system at work: three men who had signed his group's register in Hama-no-machi went to jail with him.His was still a group of ten households, and seven of them gave twelve martyrs, so the other three must have given up the faith.
The oldest written proof of the groups in Nagasaki dates only from 1664, probably because a great fire that year destroyed most of the city's archives, though the practice began much earlier.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Start of the informer reward system. The Wakayama worksheet says "1622 (Genna 4)"; Genna 4 is 1618, so one of the two numbers is wrong.The JTA chronology dates nationwide cash rewards to 1638.
- Purpose of the groups. Murdoch says their aim was rōnin and vagabondage, not Christianity, though they served the Christian bugyō well; Elison says they "were not created specifically for the anti-Christian purpose, but were intimately associated with it"; Roberson, after Lundell, counts countering Christianity among their duties.
- Start in Nagasaki. Vieira has pledges through goningumi or jūningumi from late 1618; Higashibaba says the system was first instituted there in 1622, to find lodge masters; Hesselink says ten-household groups came after 1614 and were cut to five in 1621.
- How many neighbors were liable. the five nearest (Delplace, on the decree of 1616); five on each side (Cary after Pagès; Solier, ten in all); eight or ten (Bartoli); the ten nearest families (Bartoli; Caddell).
- Execution with Antonio Kimura. November 27, 1619 (Profillet) or November 26 or 27 (Anesaki).
- Jean Shu's execution. February 22 or February 12, 1621.