The Iwakura Mission and Urakami (1871 to 1873)

In December 1871 Japan's new government sent most of its leaders abroad. The embassy was led by Iwakura Tomomi, with Kido Takayoshi, Ōkubo Toshimichi, Itō Hirobumi and Yamaguchi Naoyoshi as vice-envoys; it sailed from Yokohama on December 23, 1871, and returned on September 13, 1873, after visiting twelve countries in America and Europe.¹Its aims were to present the new government's credentials to the treaty powers, to open talks on revising the unequal treaties, and to study Western institutions.¹

At home, the Christians of Urakami were still in exile. The mission "is pressed on the freedom-of-religion issue everywhere it goes."²Wherever Iwakura went he was sharply criticized for the inhumane treatment of the Urakami Christians and for the mass arrests then under way in Sotome and around Nagasaki Bay.⁴

When the embassy reached San Francisco on January 15, 1872, it met a nation that knew little of Japan beyond vague notions of the Mikado and "the notorious Urakami kuzure" ("crackdown").³Missionaries in Japan had been writing home about the deportations for years; in June 1871 a group of Presbyterian missionaries, J. C. Hepburn among them, had urged their board to press Washington, noting that thousands of Catholics banished in 1868 were still in confinement.³In Washington, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish put an article on religious freedom into his treaty draft of March 13, 1872, and when Iwakura asked whether it applied to foreigners only, Fish answered that everyone in Japan should "have liberty to think as he pleases."³

In Europe the pressure was stronger still. In the French Assembly, on December 7, 1872, a deputy denounced the "odious and inhumane" treatment of Catholics in Japan, and the foreign minister promised to press the embassy on toleration.³

Burkman, attributing the view to the work of Marlene Mayo and others, argues that the leaders had already understood before they sailed that reform would have to come first, and that the journey added urgency rather than changing their minds.³Either way, the result is documented. In May 1872 Itō and Ōkubo, back in Japan to obtain fuller credentials, recommended removing the anti-Christian notice boards, because foreigners who read them "think of us as barbarous people who have no respect for religious freedom."³On February 24, 1873, the government issued Grand Council of State proclamation no. 68 (Unverified), and with it the anti-Christian notice boards came down; on March 14 an order went out to bring the Urakami exiles home.⁴Burkman gives 1,938 still in exile when the release was ordered, and says they were home by July.³How many returned in all is Disputed.