The catechists' journey
Imamura's Christians made themselves known in 1867.On February 23 of that year, a few Urakami catechists led by Tokusaburō set out with a passport to look for Christian communities still unknown.After three days' walk they reached Imamura in Chikugo, thirty leagues from Nagasaki.The women would not give them fire for their pipes and took them for spies, and one of the visitors wore a waistcoat with brass buttons.A widow from Amakusa took them in as her brothers.When she asked whether they wanted eggs or fowl, they guessed that the village had begun Lent and refused both, to general laughter.The villagers would not touch their rosary without first washing their hands.At last a village dyer was called, became convinced and declared himself a Christian, and on the third day all made themselves known and recited their prayers.
What the village had kept
Imamura had kept its faith without priests.In March 1867 a second visitor, a fifty-year-old bachelor who did little but pray, told Bishop Petitjean that about a hundred Christian families lived in the village and as many again around it.They had baptizers and chiefs of prayer, kept the Pater and Ave in Latin, and often said the Kyrie eleison and the act of contrition.They prayed, he said, "a rosary of sixty-three Hail Marys in honour of the sixty-three years that the Blessed Virgin spent on earth" (translated).Their baptizers sometimes baptized by dipping a piece of paper in water and pressing it to the forehead.They said that fumie had never been used there and that bonzes had never dealt with the village.
According to village tradition, a village head named Jean had been crucified for the faith, and before he died he told the Christians to hide their books and holy objects.They put them in a stone coffin, lowered it into a well and covered it with earth.About twelve years before 1867 some villagers were tried for a foreign religion but released, and their accuser was beheaded.So far from other Christians, they had believed themselves the last in Japan.
A mission station
In 1880 Imamura received a resident priest.Fr Sauret settled there that year, in a province of about a thousand Christians where missionaries had until then stayed no more than a month a year.Because a foreigner could not sleep in a private house, a Christian obtained a licence to keep an inn to lodge him, and his altar was two trestles and two planks.From November 5, 1880, he and Fr Corre baptized about a hundred people and heard some three hundred confessions.Within a year the neophytes numbered 1,210.When mayors were elected, the voters chose a Christian for Imamura, and the pagans' appeals against him failed.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Marnas says three or four catechists went, elsewhere three young men.
- One Imamura Christian went back with them to Nakano, or two followed them to Nagasaki.
- The martyr's story is village tradition, undated; Marnas spells his name Jean Mata-yemon, and its Japanese form is not given.
- A rumour at Nagasaki in 1870 said the Imamura Christians had suffered tawara-zeme, crushing under sacks, but it was only a rumour.
- The number of adults Sauret baptized in his first year (145) rests on poorly printed text.