The Gotō Islands and the Church

When the hidden Christians of Sotome began to cross the sea to the Gotō Islands at the end of the eighteenth century, they sang about it. "To Gotō, to Gotō, everyone wants to go; Gotō is gentle, even its land." Gotō City's own history of the islands records the song, and records what happened to it. The land they were given was mostly poor ground in the mountains or on shores too steep for good fishing, and the words changed: "To Gotō, to Gotō, everyone wants to go; Gotō is paradise, come and see, it is hell."¹

And yet they stayed. They kept their prayers and their calendar for seventy years in secret, they went to prison for their faith in 1868, and when they were free they put their fishing money into churches. Today the islands hold four of the twelve components of the World Heritage listing of the Hidden Christian Sites, and a priest who visits the brick church at Dozaki, the wooden church at Egami or the stone church at Kashiragashima is standing in places those singers made.²³

The Gotō Islands lie about 100 km west of Nagasaki: some 140 islands strung out for about 80 km from north-east to south-west, with Nakadōri, Wakamatsu, Naru, Hisaka and Fukue as the main ones.²Their position, close to the continent, had made them a stopping place for the Tang embassies and a base for the wakō pirates.²In the sixteenth century they were ruled by the Uku family, who later took the name Gotō.¹²

Christianity came, as Gotō City tells it, seventeen years after Xavier landed at Kagoshima.¹The eighteenth lord, Uku Sumisada, was ill. A Japanese physician named Diego was sent to him in 1562, and then, on 13 January 1566, the Jesuit brother Luís de Almeida and the Japanese preacher Lourenço set out from Kuchinotsu. They crossed by way of Fukuda and reached the port of Egawa on Fukue on 21 January.¹Almeida's medicines cured the lord's fever, and with that, the city's history says, the mission's credit rose at once; soon twenty-five of Sumisada's samurai were baptised.¹

Our page on Lourenço preserves Almeida's account of what the preaching was like. In the lord's hall, before about 400 men, Lourenço preached for three hours: he argued for a Creator, then took the pagan side himself and answered his own objections so clearly that the hall agreed God alone was to be worshipped.⁴When Almeida fell ill, Lourenço stayed on alone for months.⁴That year, after Fr Baptista Monte, Almeida's successor, came over from Bungo in May, the first Christmas Mass in the islands was said in the Okuura district of Fukue.¹

In 1567 Sumisada's second son, Sumitaka, was baptised by Fr Monte and took the name Dom Luís. As the nineteenth lord he gave land for a church below Egawa castle and worked to spread the faith; the city's history says there were more than 2,000 believers in the domain.¹The mission's fortunes then followed the family's. After Sumitaka died in 1579, at 35, a succession quarrel brought an anti-Christian lord, Sumiharu, to power, and his Christian rival Harumasa went into exile in Nagasaki.¹When Harumasa came back as twenty-first lord in 1594, he invited missionaries again between 1599 and 1606, even after the martyrdoms at Nishizaka, and the number of believers passed 2,300 by 1606.¹The city's history adds that he later gave up the faith.¹

One of the twenty-six martyrs of 1597 was from Gotō. John of Gotō, nineteen years old, was arrested in Osaka and walked with the others to Nagasaki, where he was received into the Society of Jesus just before he died.¹He was crucified at Nishizaka on 5 February 1597 and canonised with his companions in 1862.¹⁵His relics are kept today at Dozaki, and a statue of him stands in the garden there.⁶Disputed: Nagasaki Prefecture's museum page says the relics came home from Macau, while a column title on the same site says Manila.⁶

After the edict of 1614, the twenty-second lord, Gotō Moritoshi, expelled the Christians of his domain.¹In 1617 Fr Machado, who had been ministering in secret, was captured at Kanoko in the upper islands and martyred at Ōmura.¹Gotō City notes that the crackdown came about ten years later here than elsewhere, partly because powerful retainers of the Arikawa and Aokata families were Christians.¹In 1628 notice boards forbade any Christian to land, and from 1667 the domain borrowed two fumie from the Nagasaki magistrate every year, one for the upper islands and one for the lower, and carried them round on tour.¹⁷By the eighteenth century, the city's history concludes, the old Christian community of Gotō had been almost wiped out, its organisation included.¹

The faith came back in fishing boats. The Gotō domain had lost farmers to storms, droughts, famines and epidemics since the 1710s; the Ōmura domain, short of land, held its population down by harsh means, and also wanted to be rid of hidden Christians.¹In 1796 the two domains agreed on what was called the "thousand people" arrangement: Ōmura would send a thousand farmers to Gotō.¹In 1797 the lord Gotō Moriyuki asked for them, the Ōmura lord agreed, and 108 people from Kurosaki and Mie villages in Sotome landed on 28 November on the beach at Rokuhō in Okuura, settling at Heizō, Kurozō and Kusuhara.¹⁸Most of them, the city and Nagasaki City's Nagazine both say, were hidden Christians.¹⁸More followed, officially and privately, until perhaps 3,000 had come.¹⁸Smaller groups had already moved to Mīraku in 1772 and 1773.¹⁹

Nagazine notes a quiet piece of evidence. Green schist from the Nishisonogi peninsula, a stone not found in Gotō, turns up in the islands in hearths and walls; the settlers seem to have brought it as ballast or anchors, and the islanders still call it "stone carried from Sotome".⁸They spread from Nozaki in the north to Nakadōri, Naru, Hisaka and Fukue, and to small islands like Kashiragashima, Himeshima and Sagashima.¹

On Nozaki they hid as parishioners of a Shinto shrine.¹⁰On Kashiragashima, an island where the sick had been sent, they came with a Buddhist pioneer, Maeda Gidayū, who gave them cover.¹¹At Egami on Naru, four families made a home in a hidden valley by the sea.¹²On Hisaka the domain invited settlers to open up the island, and Christians and Buddhists cleared rice fields side by side.¹³Outwardly they were Buddhists; when a death came, a priest of the temple was called, but while he chanted, elders in the next house said a prayer to undo the sutra.¹They kept the Church's calendar and their own officers, the chōkata and the mizukata, as the hidden Christians of Sotome did.¹⁴

The news of the discovery of the hidden Christians at Ōura in 1865 reached the islands. Christians from Kashiragashima went secretly to Ōura to meet the missionaries, and in February 1867 Father Petitjean sent Father Cousin on a secret journey to Gotō, travelling only by night and saying Mass in islands where, his obituary says, it had not been offered for nearly three centuries.¹¹¹⁵The leader Domingo Matsujirō moved to Kashiragashima that year, and his house became a chapel.¹¹

Then the Christians declared themselves, and persecution fell. In 1868 about 200 Christian farmers of Hisaka who refused to give up their faith were arrested. Twenty-two leaders were sent to Fukue and tortured for more than ten days; then all of them were crammed into a prison of six tsubo, about twelve mats, at Rōya no Sako.¹¹³The place guide counts forty-two dead, many of them old people and small children; one grave marker reads "Jiwanna, died aged 7".¹³Disputed: 42 dead in the prefecture's memorial page and the school guide; 43 names on the memorial in a prefecture column.¹³The persecution spread through the islands as the Gotō kuzure.¹At Okuura, Marnas records, fifty-nine Christians were seized on 16 December 1868.⁶In 1870 at Tainoura, in the upper islands, local samurai killed six unresisting Christians to test their swords.¹

After the ban boards came down in February 1873, the catechist Kiyokawa Sawajirō of Himeshima and others went to Nagasaki to fetch a priest of the Paris Foreign Missions, Father Fraineau.¹When he said Mass in the open air at Dozaki, Gotō City says, more than a thousand Catholics came by boat from all over the lower islands.¹From 1880 the islands were split between two resident priests, Father Marmand in the south and Father Bourelle in the north, and from 1893 Father Pelu, at Dozaki since 1888, was superior of all Gotō.¹⁶¹⁶Marmand's society credits him with ten churches in barely ten years; Pelu, "armed with ruler and compass," drew the plans for brick churches himself.⁶

The people paid, and the people built. Gotō City lists the line of churches that followed: Ōtomari, Dozaki in 1880, Hamawaki in 1881, Aosagaura in 1878, Ebukuro in 1882, Kashiragashima in 1887, Egami in 1906, each later rebuilt larger.¹Egami's church of 1918 was paid for by selling kibinago, a little silver sardine; so was the brick church at Nokubi on Nozaki in 1908.¹⁰¹²The carpenter who built many of them was Tetsukawa Yosuke, the Gotō carpenter who learned church building from the French priests.¹¹⁰At Kashiragashima a small hamlet spent ten years cutting its own sandstone for the church finished in 1919.¹¹On Hisaka, when Hamawaki was rebuilt in concrete in 1931, the people of Gorin, who could not afford a church, took the old one apart and carried it across the island by sea.¹³

In 2018 the villages of Nozaki, Kashiragashima, Hisaka and Egami were inscribed with the other Hidden Christian Sites.³The Kyōdō news glossary sums up their story in a few lines: farmers who fled the strict Ōmura domain, unable to live on the good flat land the Buddhists already held, cleared steep slopes and mountain valleys instead.²At Rōya no Sako a memorial church of 1984 marks out the size of the old prison in its carpet, and every autumn believers gather there for the martyrs.¹³Not all have stayed Catholic: some families kept the hidden ways, and the scholar Miyazaki Kentarō counted about sixty Kakure Kirishitan households in Gotō around 2000; four Gotō groups had already disbanded in 1995.¹⁴

The song had turned bitter. But the people who sang it stayed, and the islands where they found hell are now known for their churches.

Read the place guides for Dozaki, Hisaka, Egami, Kashiragashima and Nozaki; the pages on Lourenço, Luís de Almeida and the twenty-six martyrs; and Tetsukawa Yosuke, the islands' church builder.