One island, two families of faith
is a small island off the north-west coast of , joined to it today by a bridge.Christianity came here early. The Catholic parish history dates the first preaching on the island to 1558, by the Jesuit Fr , and says that many islanders were baptised.The curator of the island's museum, Nakazono Shigeo, counts the beginning from the conversions of the Koteda and Ichibu lands in 1558 and 1565.For four and a half centuries since, the people of Ikitsuki have kept that faith in two different ways.
The steward who stayed
Gaspar Nishi Genka was born on Ikitsuki in 1556 and baptised by Fr Vilela as a two-year-old in 1558, together with his father, a retainer of Dom Antonio Koteda.When the Christian lords Jeronimo Koteda and his cousin Balthasar left their lands for in 1599 with six hundred retainers, rather than give up the faith, Gaspar lost his office as steward. He did not leave the island. He and his wife Ursula stayed on as its catechists.
For ten years he held the scattered faithful together. Then he was denounced, and condemned for refusing to abandon the faith, for supporting other believers, and even for baptising. He asked to be crucified and was refused. He asked instead to die at Kurose no Tsuji, the crossroads where, the Church's account says, Fr had raised a great cross in 1563 (Tradition). That was granted. On 14 November 1609 he was beheaded there by the magistrate, who had been his friend. Ursula and their eldest son John were martyred at about the same time.Their son Thomas became a priest and died in Nagasaki in 1634; he was canonised in 1987. Gaspar himself was beatified in Nagasaki in 2008, among the 188.
The bishops' committee that wrote his life adds one line that matters for everything that follows: the of Ikitsuki went on tending the graves of Gaspar and his family all through the centuries of the closed country.Whatever else divided the island later, it kept its martyr.
Keeping the forms
After 1599 the churches and crosses of Ikitsuki were destroyed, Nakazono writes, and Christians had to live with Buddhism and Shinto alongside their own faith. But they also organised new (confraria), which honoured holy pictures and kept the feasts. These confraternities became the village groups known as kaito and tsumoto, and they carried the faith through more than 250 years of prohibition.
Nakazono has described how these groups kept their most treasured object, called the Gozensama. It was kept in the house of the group's head (oyaji-yaku), in a wooden box in the storeroom (nando). Only for the great feasts, such as "Agari-sama" (Easter) and "Gotanjo" (Christmas), was it brought out and hung on a temporary altar. The Gozensama was most often a hanging scroll with a holy picture, together with a jar of holy water drawn from Nakaenoshima, the islet of the martyrs, and an "otenpensha", a bundle of hemp cords used for blessing. Nakazono traces these to the holy pictures painted at the Jesuit seminary from the 1590s, to sixteenth-century holy-water vessels, and to the disciplines used for penance.Once there were more than twenty such groups on the island, each of a few dozen households.
The prayers came down the same way. In the village of Ichibu, the journalist Amano Hisaki watched three men chant about thirty over half an hour, sometimes with joined hands and sometimes making the sign of the cross, ending with three sung prayers: "Raodate" (Laudate Dominum), "Najo" (Nunc dimittis) and "Gururiyoza" (O gloriosa Domina).The musicologist Minagawa Tatsuo found that a chant printed in Spain in 1553 had the same Latin words and tune as the Gururiyoza.The full story of that hymn is on the orasho page.
Nakazono's own view, which he states firmly, is that the absence of priests did not make the invent new things; because they had no one to teach them what to change, they handed on what they had received in the same form. He says the island's elders say this themselves.That is his interpretation. The older view, which Nippon.com quotes from Murakami Shigeyoshi's 1988 encyclopedia of Japanese religion, held that the hidden Christians, cut off from the Church's teaching, gradually drifted from Catholic doctrine and practice and deepened their syncretism with local religion.Readers can weigh the two; but the scrolls, the water and the Latin syllables are there to be seen and heard.
The return to the Church
In 1865 hidden Christians from made themselves known to Fr at Oura, and the news ran through the hidden villages. On Ikitsuki the answer came slowly. Catholics from Kuroshima came to the island and urged the people to return to the Church.The first Catholic baptisms followed the arrival in Hirado of Fr Albert Pélu of the Paris Foreign Missions in 1878.The Catholic tradition of Yamada parish is that its faithful are the descendants of hidden Christians who returned at that time, especially in 1879 and 1880, guided in great part by the faithful of Kuroshima.
Their church came later. Fr Jean-François Matrat of the Paris Foreign Missions, who served the Kuroshima and Hirado district for forty years, began the present church; it was designed and built by the great church-builder , in brick, and completed in 1912.Matrat's MEP obituary says he built "a beautiful brick church" there for a community of former hidden Christians "who had rejoined the fold of the Church" (our translation).It is dedicated to Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows.Inside, behind the main altar, a relief tells the story of the persecution on Ikitsuki.After St Thomas Nishi was canonised on 18 October 1987, the parish raised a monument to his canonisation in the church forecourt in September 1988. Kurose no Tsuji, where his father died, is close by.In 1993 a great cross was raised again beside Gaspar's grave there.
Those who returned were few. A study by the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, drawing on the Ichibu church's own figures, puts them at about three percent of the island's people.Nakazono gives the main reason: on Ikitsuki the hidden faith had come to live alongside Buddhism and Shinto, and to give up the household Buddhist altar where the ancestors were honoured seemed to many like neglecting the ancestors.He also notes that the village groups were bound up with the whole life of the village and its households.So for a century Ikitsuki held two families of faith side by side: the Catholics of Yamada and Ichibu, whom the old Christians might call "new Christians", and the "old Christians" themselves.
A meeting, and a farewell
In April 2010 Nakazono described a festival at Sakaime, the Oseijo-matsuri, held every two years, at which the three Gozensama of the village were displayed together. That year an unexpected guest came: Mr Murakami, the chokata (leader) of a hidden-Christian group from in , near Nagasaki. He listened to the Sakaime prayers with deep feeling and talked long with the people about their faith.Nakazono wrote that it was moving that people who had held the same Kirishitan faith four hundred years ago, and had since passed through the ban, the return of many to the Catholic Church, and the changes of modern life, could meet face to face, each still keeping the ancient forms.
The modern changes were heavy. Nakazono traces the decline to the island's economy: men went to sea on the great purse-seine fishing boats and to construction work away from home; machines replaced oxen, so farming rituals mattered less; medicine replaced the old rites for the sick; and from around 1990, when the deep-sea fishing and harbour construction trades declined, young people left the island to find work, so that the households that carried the faith could not continue.In 1954, he told Nippon.com, just under ninety percent of Ikitsuki's 11,000 people belonged to the old faith; in 2017 fewer than 300 did.
Then came what he called a turning point. At the end of March 2024 the Sakaime group dissolved; in July the Motofure Tsujikaito followed; and the Motofure Kobakaito was to end with its New Year rites of 2025. That left only one group at the kaito or tsumoto level on the whole island, at Yamada, kept by two households, with a few small groups that honour charms and some homes where individuals still keep a sacred object or say the orasho.Counting from 1558, he wrote, it was a "period" after 467 years.
The Catholic parish of Yamada is still there, in Tetsukawa Yosuke's brick church, with Mass on Sundays.The orasho can still be heard in recordings and in the museum, Shima no Yakata, whose director has spent decades recording the island's faith so that, as he put it, future generations and the world can learn from it.And Gaspar Nishi's grave, which both families of Ikitsuki guarded through the centuries, is now honoured by the whole Church: in 2008, the man who stayed on his island to teach the faith was declared Blessed.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Yamada Church dates. Completed and dedicated 1912 (kyokai.com, Nagasaki tourism portal, Nanzan);begun 1911 and dedicated 1913 (Pauline Laudate);built "in 1911" (Matrat's MEP notice).Disputed.
- Fr Cosme de Torres's cross at Kurose no Tsuji, 1563. Tradition (CBCJ: "is said to have been").