On the afternoon of 17 March 1865, a French priest named was in his new church on the hill at , in Nagasaki. A group of about fifteen farmers from the nearby village of came in. One woman, remembered as , came close to him and said: "All of us here have the same heart as you." Then she asked: "Where is the statue of Santa Maria?"
Petitjean wrote her words down as he heard them, in romanized Japanese: "Santa Maria gozo wa doko?" Christianity had been banned in Japan for about 250 years. The last missionary had been killed in 1644. No priest had said Mass for these families in living memory. Yet here they were, asking for Mary.
「ここにおります私どもは、全部あなた様と同じ心でございます」
「サンタ・マリアの御像はどこ？」
Santa Maria gozo wa doko?
"All of us here have the same heart as you." / "Where is the statue of Santa Maria?"
So how did a faith survive two and a half centuries with no priests, no churches and no open worship? The short answer is this: ordinary Japanese laypeople carried it, hand to hand, parent to child. And one village, Urakami, runs through the whole story like a thread. To see how, we have to go back to a beach in the south.
Sources: the 1865 scene
- Petitjean recorded the day in French and spelled the woman’s question in romanized Japanese; Oratio.jp quotes it.
- Nagasaki City’s history page says the statue they prayed before is still at the right-hand altar.
- Her name is given as Sugimoto Yuri in later accounts ("remembered as").
The gift: a layman brings a saint
The story begins, fittingly, with a layman. (also written Yajirō) was a man from , a port at the southern tip of Kyushu, who met the Jesuit abroad and was baptized as Paulo de Santa Fé, "Paul of the Holy Faith." On he brought Xavier home to Kagoshima, where his relatives welcomed the missionaries warmly.
The faith spread faster than anyone expected. From about 6,000 converts in 1559 it grew to around 300,000 by 1601. One estimate puts the total baptized by the early 1630s at 760,000, in a country of perhaps 12 million. Some regional lords, the , became Christians too. The first, , opened the little port of to Portuguese ships and in 1580 . The farming valley of Urakami lay just north of the port. When the warlord seized Nagasaki in 1588, he took Urakami with it as his own land.
From the start, Christians were given tools to pray without a priest. In 1550 Xavier gave the believers of Kagoshima a church calendar, so they would know the feast days. Remember that calendar. It will matter later.
Hideyoshi soon turned against the new faith. In 1587 he , declaring that "Japan is the Land of the Gods." (Why he turned is ; historians offer several reasons.) In the winter of 1596 to 1597, were marched about 1,000 kilometers from Kyoto and Sakai. On their last morning they walked the old Urakami road into Nagasaki, and on 5 February 1597 they were crucified on . The road of their last walk ran through Urakami. The gift had come with a warning.
日本ハ神國たる處、きりしたん國より邪法を授候儀、太以不可然候事。
"Japan is the Land of the Gods. That a pernicious doctrine should be diffused here from the Kirishitan Country is most undesirable."
Sources: the Christian century
- Xavier’s own letter on the Kagoshima landing, quoted by the Diocese of Kagoshima.
- Convert numbers are scholarly estimates, not counts.
- The edict wording comes from a Wikipedia transcription of the Matsura family document (tertiary; to be replaced with the document image).
- The route of the 26 is from the Japan Tourism Agency’s heritage commentary.
The test: a notice board and a brass plaque
In 1614 the Tokugawa shogunate , expelled the missionaries and tore down the churches. Mass executions followed, and in 1637 to 1638 the ended in a siege at . Japan closed itself to the outside world, leaving only the Dutch on the tiny artificial island of in Nagasaki harbor.
Then the state set out to make every household prove it was not Christian. From 1635 each family had to be registered at a Buddhist temple that vouched for it, a system called . Public notice boards, the , offered cash for informers. The board of 1682 promised 500 pieces of silver for a priest and 100 for an ordinary believer. If a Christian was found hiding, the village headman and the neighbors in the five-household group could be punished too. The boards stayed up until 1873.
The sharpest test was the , the "picture to step on." From 1628 people were made to tread on an image of Christ or Mary. In 1669 the Nagasaki magistrate had 20 brass plaques cast for the purpose. Nineteen of them survive today at the . In Nagasaki the treading became an annual New Year event, done street by street.
Fumi-e 踏み絵
- What: An image of Christ or Mary to tread on, used from 1628.
- Made: In 1669 the Nagasaki magistrate had 20 brass plaques cast.
- Where now: 19 survive at the Tokyo National Museum (e.g. C-711, Immaculate Conception), an Important Cultural Property group.
- When: In Nagasaki, an annual New Year event, street by street.
In Urakami it happened at the house of the village headman, the . Every New Year the villagers were summoned there to tread on the image. Many of them did it while praying the , a prayer of sorrow for sin. They stepped on the face they loved, and asked forgiveness at the same moment. How could a faith live like that for two centuries?
Sources: the fumi-e in Urakami
- The Takaya house and the Konchirisan come from the Urakami parish history.
- The 1682 notice board text is held by the Wakayama Prefectural Archives.
The keepers: baptizers, calendars and songs
It lived because the laypeople organized themselves. Each hidden community had a , the keeper of the book of feasts; a , the baptizer; and elders. Baptism was the ritual that held everything together, so the baptizer's office was counted the highest of all.
The calendar came back, too. The hidden Christians kept the feasts by a from the year 1634 into the old lunar calendar. It began each year with the Annunciation. By it was handed down by , a catechist of , the coast north of Nagasaki.
Prayers were memorized and passed on by mouth as (from Latin oratio), keeping the sounds of Latin and Portuguese. On , off northwest Kyushu, one sung prayer called "Gururiyōza" turned out to be the Marian hymn O gloriosa Domina as printed in Spain in 1553. That Spanish melody later fell out of use in Spain itself. It survives as a living song only on Ikitsuki.
Families prayed before white or blue Chinese , the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy, holding a child. To them she was Mary. When Urakami was raided in the 1850s, officials wrote down that the villagers' main image was that is, Santa Maria.
Maria Kannon マリア観音
- What: A white or blue Chinese porcelain Kannon holding a child, prayed to as Mary.
- Urakami: Officials in the 1850s recorded the villagers’ main image as "Hantamaruya," Santa Maria.
The cost of keeping was high. Urakami was , again around 1839 to 1842, and again in 1856. After the 1856 raid, a man named was the only baptizer to survive it. One man, holding the sacrament for everyone. And then, just as Bastian had promised, foreign ships began to arrive.
The reveal: "Where is Santa Maria?"
In 1863 two French priests of the , and Bernard Petitjean, reached Nagasaki. Their church at Ōura, officially named for the 26 Martyrs, was dedicated early in 1865.
Now the scene at the start makes sense. The farmers who came in on 17 March were Urakami's keepers, and Mary, their "Hantamaruya," was the image they had prayed to in secret for generations. That same statue still stands at the right-hand altar of Ōura Cathedral.
Full storyThe Discovery of the Hidden Christians, 1865Who came, what was said, and how we know it, in its own article.Ōura church: as built, and today
Ōura church as first built: Unknown photographer, Public domain. Commons
Ōura Cathedral today: Houjyou-Minori, CC0. Commons
Over the next two years the villagers built in Urakami, where the priests slipped in to teach, baptize and say Mass. It was as if Bastian's prophecy had come true. But the shogunate's notice boards were still standing.
The price: the whole village goes on a "journey"
Emboldened, the Urakami families stopped hiding. They buried their dead without Buddhist monks, and more than 400 households signed papers refusing temple registration. At 1 a.m. on 15 July 1867, officers raided the secret chapel of St Francis Xavier. A young man named calmly took down the holy pictures, knelt, put his hands behind his back and said: "Please tie me." The officers hesitated, afraid of Sixty-eight people were seized that night. This was the fourth Urakami crackdown, the .
「縄をかけて下さい」
"Please tie me."
The new Meiji government, which replaced the shogunate in 1868, did not lift the ban. It sent 114 leaders to , and . In January 1870 it emptied the village. In all 3,394 people were scattered across western Japan. Many walked out in falling snow wearing the white veils from their baptisms. The villagers called it the , "the journey."
, a mother of four sent to , remembered praying the rosary aloud as they were led away. She was later held in a horse stable with no water and no light. When people died in the dark, the others felt for breath with their fingertips and prayed over them. At Tsuwano, and Jinzaburō were thrown naked into an icy pond. When the officials ordered them out, Sen'emon, close to losing consciousness, told Jinzaburō: "We are in a mountain of treasure. Don't think of coming out." Neither came out until they were dragged from the water. (Disputed: Urakawa gives these words to Sen'emon; Jinzaburō's own memoir, as quoted by the Urakami parish, has them without a clear speaker.) Even Sugimoto Yuri, the woman who had whispered to Petitjean, was exiled to Fukuyama.
「いま宝の山に登りておるからは、この池よりあがられん」
"I am now climbing a mountain of treasure, so I cannot come out of this pond."
How many died? , but we follow 613, the figure in the Japan Tourism Agency chronology and the Urakami parish history. Other sources give about 660 or 662. Meanwhile Japan's leaders were touring the West, and everywhere the Iwakura mission went, it heard about Urakami.
Freedom, sort of
On 24 February 1873 the government issued Dajōkan Proclamation No. 68, ordering the old notice boards taken down. That ended the ban as policy. But look at the title: it speaks of posting proclamations and removing old boards. It never proclaimed religious freedom. Christianity was tolerated by silence.
The exiles came home to almost nothing. numbers: about 1,900 returned in the parish count, 1,930 in one official text, 2,911 in another. That September, 736 of the returnees had no house at all.
Sada remembered buying three-year-old dried sweet potato slices, the cheapest food there was. They were full of worms. With no pot, the family soaked them in water and "ate the worms too." They dug their fields with broken pottery. "But it was not hard," she said. It was far better than the journey, they could work freely, and "we could say our prayers out loud." The parish history adds that their ancestors had waited seven generations for exactly that.
「虫もいっしょに食べました。」……「けれども苦しいことはありませんでした。『旅』よりずっとよかったし、自由に働けて、そして大声でオラショすることができました。」
"We ate the worms too." ... "But it was not hard. It was far better than the journey, we could work freely, and we could say our prayers out loud."
Legal freedom came only with the . Its Article 28 granted freedom of religious belief, but only "within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects." (Official 1889 English translation by Ito Miyoji.) Not every hidden family rejoined the Church. Those who kept their ancestors' forms are the people now called .
日本臣民ハ安寧秩序ヲ妨ケス及臣民タルノ義務ニ背カサル限ニ於テ信教ノ自由ヲ有ス
"Japanese subjects shall, within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects, enjoy freedom of religious belief."
A cathedral on the fumi-e ground
The returnees wanted a church of their own. In 1880 the Takaya family's estate came up for sale, the very house where their ancestors had trodden on the fumi-e and where the exile had been announced. On 4 June 1880 the Urakami Catholics bought it for 1,600 yen. They held their first Mass there on 15 August, the Feast of the Assumption.
On that ground they raised a cathedral of brick, begun in 1895, finished in 1914 or 1915 (completion and dedication are dated 17 March 1914 by Urakawa and 18 March 1915 by the parish, as our The Takaya Headman's Estate page sets out: Disputed), with twin towers added in 1925. In its day it was praised as , "the finest in the East." Was it really the largest church in East Asia? : that is a period boast, and we have not found a measured comparison. Either way, it was a farmers' cathedral standing where their faith had once been tested every New Year. And the state was watching again.
Sources: the cathedral site
- The 1880 purchase and first Mass come from the parish history.
- Reading that the cathedral stands on the old headman’s estate is strong but indirect: the parish says the temporary church there was moved back to make room for the main church.
- Dates of building: Japan Tourism Agency and the Atomic Bomb Museum.
Reined in
The Church was becoming Japanese. In 1927 Nagasaki was given to Japanese leadership, and on 30 October that year Pope Pius XI consecrated in Rome as the first Japanese bishop.
But the government promoted shrine Shinto as a patriotic duty, calling it civic rather than religious. In May 1932 about 60 in Tokyo were marched to , the shrine for Japan's war dead, and some would not bow. In 1936 Rome's mission office, Propaganda Fide, issued the instruction Pluries instanterque, which treated such rites as "civil acts to manifest and foster devotion to one's country" and allowed Catholics to take part. On the island of , a local campaign in the 1930s closed the Catholic girls' school, expelled the Church's workers and forced most believers to renounce their faith.
The 1939 Religious Organizations Law put every religion under state control. Western bishops were replaced by Japanese ones, the government briefly demanded that Catholics cut their tie with the Pope, and in 1941 the Church was reorganized under state oversight. Then the war came home to Urakami.
The bomb falls on Urakami
At 11:02 a.m. on 9 August 1945 an atomic bomb exploded about 500 meters above Urakami. About 74,000 of Nagasaki's 240,000 people died. Of Urakami's 12,000 Catholics, about 8,500 were killed. The cathedral collapsed, leaving only parts of its walls. The village that had survived 250 years of hiding and an exile was nearly wiped out in a moment.
Urakami Cathedral: the ruins, and the first memorial service
Urakami Cathedral destroyed by the atomic bomb: Unknown photographer (published Mainichi Shimbun, 1975), Public domain (Japan, pre-1957 photograph). Commons
Memorial service at the ruins of Urakami Cathedral: Nagasaki City Office, war-damage postcard, Public domain. Commons
Among the injured was Dr , a radiologist who had become Catholic in 1934, already sick with leukemia, whose wife died in the blast. The cathedral's great bell was dug out of the rubble almost undamaged. At Nagai's urging it was hung from three logs, and on Christmas Eve 1945 it rang over the ruins. A year later their wooden temporary church was the first public building rebuilt in the bombed area. Nagai's book The Bells of Nagasaki appeared in 1949. He died in 1951, aged 43.
Sources: the bombing
- Casualty figures for Urakami’s Catholics: the Archbishop of Nagasaki’s 2025 homily.
- Damage to the cathedral: Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.
- Nagai’s life dates: the Nagai Takashi Memorial Museum.
Real freedom arrived that winter. The of 15 December 1945 ordered Japan "to separate religion from the state." The Constitution of 1946 says plainly in Article 20: "Freedom of religion is guaranteed to all." The freedom Urakami had waited for came at a terrible price.
信教の自由は、何人に対してもこれを保障する。
"Freedom of religion is guaranteed to all."
Today: small, quiet, and still hand to hand
Freedom did not bring crowds. At the end of 2024 Japan had 412,958 Catholics, 0.331 percent of the population, down from 435,083 in 2020. Nagasaki is the exception, with Catholics making up over 4 percent of the archdiocese. The bishops describe an ageing Church that relies more and more on migrants from Asia and South America, and admit that the decline can be discouraging. The Kakure Kirishitan are fading too. On Ikitsuki, three of the last village groups dissolved between March 2024 and New Year 2025. Only one remains at that level, kept by two households, alongside a few smaller groups and families.
And yet the thread holds. On 24 November 2008, about 30,000 people gathered in Nagasaki for the . In 2018 in the Nagasaki Region as World Heritage. In 2019 prayed at Nishizaka and at the Urakami hypocenter. In November 2025, at a small , a 75-year-old chōkata still recited the orashio for about thirty minutes, as the keepers before him had done.
The statue Sugimoto Yuri asked for still stands in Ōura. The faith it stood for is still passed the way it always was in Japan: from one pair of hands to the next.
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