Hakata: Christians in the Merchant City of Chikuzen

Hakata (博多) was a rich port in Chikuzen (筑前), which a Jesuit letter of 1557 called "a great city of many rich merchants" (translated).¹It lay five days from Funai (府内) and one day by sea from Hirado (平戸), and until then its port had been divided between the Ōtomo (大友) and Ōuchi (大内) houses.¹Francis Xavier (ザビエル) and his companions visited a large Zen temple in Hakata, whose priests welcomed them gladly, thinking they came from India, the cradle of Buddhism.¹¹He rebuked the abbot and monks for their morals and for teaching that there was no life after death while taking offerings for the dead, and some of them laughed at him.¹¹

In 1557 Ōtomo Sōrin (大友宗麟), who had lately gained the province, granted the Jesuits a field in the city.¹¹²Fr Baltasar Gago went to take possession with the lord's papers and built a church.¹³An early convert, the boy Damião, later became a Jesuit brother.¹André, a gentleman baptized at Yamaguchi (山口) by Fr Cosme de Torres, gave up his property and moved his family to Hakata to live beside the church.¹³On Holy Thursday 1559 he preached on the Passion and scourged himself.¹⁴Soon after Easter, when factions troubled the city, his pagan lord had him killed, and he knelt and prayed for his killers.¹⁴¹⁵

In 1559 enemies of the Ōtomo attacked Hakata, and the young mission was ruined.²³⁴Chikushi Korekado (筑紫惟門), who had gone over to Mōri Motonari (毛利元就), sacked the city with two thousand men.³It was said that Buddhist priests, unwilling to live under a lord who favoured Christianity, opened the gates to the enemy.¹⁶⁴Gago, Brother Guilherme Pereira and a Japanese Christian named Silvestre fled by night to a ship, but the captain robbed them and threatened them with death.¹⁶¹⁷Offered his freedom, the Japanese Christian refused to leave the missionaries.¹⁶They were stripped and held in a dungeon beneath the ramparts.¹⁶¹⁷A local Christian, Catocu João, paid a soldier twenty cruzados to free Pereira, and in the end the missionaries reached Bungo (豊後).¹⁷¹⁸

The Christians held on without priests: years later, though no missionary had been in Hakata for ten years, Fr Cabral found a fine church there and many fervent Christians.¹⁹In 1573 a converted Buddhist monk from the city named Jean was working for the faith in nearby Munakata (宗像).²⁰²¹About 1585 a leading Christian named Lucas raised a beautiful cross coated in black lacquer with a gilded title, and Fr Pedro Gomez came to bless it.²²

When Toyotomi Hideyoshi (豊臣秀吉) halted in Chikuzen, he had Hakata, ruined by war, entirely rebuilt.⁵⁶He allowed no Buddhist temple or monastery inside the walls, only a church and house for the fathers, whose site he marked himself.⁶⁵By 1596 the city had four thousand Christians.²³After an earthquake that year nearly destroyed it, the faithful searched the ruins, and it was reported that not one Christian had been killed.²³²⁴

On January 31, 1597, the boat carrying the twenty-six prisoners bound for Nagasaki (長崎) put in at Hakata, and the people received them kindly.²⁵²⁶²⁷Local Christians visited them in tears, and Paul Miki (パウロ三木) gave his close friend Diego Cogen a letter for the Vice-Provincial, Fr Gomez.²⁸²⁶The martyrs left on February 1, 1597, for Karatsu (唐津).²⁹

Soon afterwards the city's governor ordered the Christians, more than a thousand of them, to give up their rosaries, crosses and images and to hang pagan charm tablets on their doors.³⁰³¹³²They refused, and sent a leading member to Nagasaki to ask the Jesuits which Christian practices they might hide and which they must keep.³⁰³¹

In 1599 a preacher sent by Fr Valignano brought 1,500 people to baptism around Hakata in less than two months.⁷When Kuroda Nagamasa (黒田長政) received Chikuzen in 1601, the city had over a thousand Christians, and most of his officers were Christians.³³He took in Akashi Kamon (明石掃部) with three hundred followers, as well as François, a grandson of Ōtomo Sōrin.³³In 1602, at the request of his very Christian father, Kuroda Josui (黒田如水), the new lord gave the Jesuits a large site, on condition that they build nothing that looked religious.³⁴³⁵When Buddhist priests complained, the Jesuits withdrew for a time to Akizuki (秋月), and the old lord built rooms on the site as if for himself, so that his son would not take back the gift.³⁵That year a bishop called the Jesuit residence in Hakata very important.³⁶

According to a legend, a Japanese Jesuit lost a public debate with a Buddhist priest in 1603, and the temple Shōryūji (勝立寺) was built on the site of a church.³⁷³⁸By 1604 the Kuroda lord had built the Jesuits a church in the city.³⁹⁴⁰Josui's Christian funeral was held there that year, attended by his son and many pagan retainers carrying candles.⁴¹Nearly eight hundred people were baptized in 1604 in Hakata, Akizuki and the rest of Chikuzen.⁴²In 1606 the lord praised the church as sturdy and its plan as a novelty unlike any Japanese temple.⁴³In 1613 the Hakata house had three priests, two of them Japanese, Julian Nakaura (中浦ジュリアン) and Thomas Tsuji, with residences at Amagi (甘木) and Yanagawa (柳川) depending on it.⁴⁴

In 1613 the pagan lords of Chikuzen and Chikugo (筑後), to please the ruler, banished the Jesuits and destroyed three of their residences.⁸The city had two parts, Hakata proper and Fukuoka (福岡), and in March 1614 all the Christians were summoned to Fukuoka.⁴⁵⁴⁶About a hundred heads of family gave way, all except Thomas Watanabe Chozaemon and Joachim Shindo, whom a record calls "the doctor of the poor".⁴⁵⁴⁶The physician, about forty-nine, was a Jesuit catechist who treated the poor free and had long guided the Christians in the absence of priests.⁴⁷The two were hung head down from a great pine outside the city, Joachim's head above Thomas's feet, for two nights and the day between.⁴⁷⁴⁸They comforted each other with the memory of Christ's Passion.⁴⁹Taken down, blind with hunger and pain, they were beheaded, and on the same day a third Christian, Matthias, was beheaded at Akizuki.⁴⁹⁴⁵⁵⁰

Jean Akashi Jirobyoe, a warrior born in Bizen (備前) and an officer of Kuroda Nagamasa, became a Christian on the advice of his relative Akashi Kamon, one of the generals of Toyotomi Hideyori.⁹¹⁰When a lieutenant reported in 1616 that he could not be shaken, the lord ordered apostasy or death, but the sentence waited because it was New Year, when no death sentences were carried out.¹⁰His friend Francisco Nakamura Gonemon, a native of the city who had gathered martyrs' bodies at great risk, brought him news of the sentence.⁵¹⁵²Jean was beheaded at Hakata on March 19, 1617, aged forty.⁹⁵³⁵⁴His wife Catherine lifted his head and set it on her own, to show that the man is the head of the woman.⁵¹Nakamura secretly took the body, handed the guards a coffin filled with earth, and sent the relics to Nagasaki.⁵⁵Catherine was stripped of everything and left to live on alms.⁵⁵

The persecution went on, and in 1621 ten Christians of Chikuzen were imprisoned for the faith, and five of them died there of hunger.⁵⁶In 1624 the province's two governors banished foreign Christians and issued harsh ordinances, but few wavered.⁵⁷Around 1870, deported Christians of Urakami (浦上) bound for Hagi (萩) were held for five months in an abandoned pagoda in Fukuoka and Hakata, by then one town of nearly 60,000.⁵⁸