A quiet street in Bunkyō
In a residential street in Kohinata, Bunkyō ward, Tokyo, stands a stone marked "Site of the yashiki," a historic site of the Tokyo metropolis. Nearby a slope is still called Kirishitan-zaka, the Christian slope. The Archdiocese of Tokyo's pilgrim guide, published for the beatification of Peter and the 187 martyrs in 2008, notes that the area was once so overgrown that it was dark even at midday, "like deep mountains," and that the compound covered more than 6,000 tsubo.Its other name was the Yama-yashiki, the "mountain mansion."
For a century and a half this was the place where the shogunate kept the missionaries it caught. It was meant to be a place where the faith ended. Its story ends instead with a priest who would not stop baptising, and with a picture of Our Lady that came back to light.
Inoue's residence
The compound began with , lord of Chikugo, the great officer who directed the Tokugawa search for Christians (see Inoue Masashige).The Nipponica entry by Ebisawa Arimichi explains that Inoue, who held the office of religious inspector together with that of chief inspector, first used his lower residence at Kohinata to hold the Italian priest and his companions, who had entered Japan in 1643, and to gather information for the inspection of religion; in 1646 he built cells and storehouses there.
The physical anthropologist Shinoda Ken'ichi of the National Museum of Nature and Science tells the same beginning. In 1643, five years after the Shimabara rising, the Portuguese Jesuit Pedro Marques and nine others landed in Chikuzen and were seized. Sent to Edo and held in the Denmachō prison, they were moved in 1646 to cells and a guardhouse built at Inoue's residence. "This was the beginning of the Kirishitan yashiki."Kyodo News's glossary gives its first extent as about 23,000 square metres.
The priests of 1643
Our Inoue Masashige page tells what happened to those priests, from Hubert Cieslik's study. The Jesuits Pedro Marques, Alfonso Arroyo, Francisco Cassola and Giuseppe Chiara, with six companions, landed on Ōshima in Chikuzen on 27 June 1643 and were arrested at once. They had come hoping to bring back their former superior , who had fallen in the pit ten years before; and Ferreira was made to act as interpreter at their trial. In Edo they were questioned often, even by the shogun himself, and condemned to the pit, where, according to Inoue's report, they all apostatised. Then they were confined at Kohinata until their deaths.
Chiara was given the Japanese name Okamoto San'emon and a Japanese wife, lived the rest of his life in the compound and served the religious inspection office.The Kōdansha dictionary says he was tortured in the Kirishitan yashiki and gave up his faith, and that he died on the 25th day of the 7th month of Jōkyō 2 (1685), at eighty-three.Shinoda notes that he is well known as the model for Sebastião Rodrigues in 's Silence, and that because the priests outwardly became Buddhists they were buried at the Muryōin temple in Koishikawa; the last of the group died in 1701, aged seventy-eight.
We have only the inquisitor's word for what was said in the pit. Cieslik warned that the pit "rendered clear thinking and genuine moral decision quite impossible within a short period of time," and that "the greatest caution must be exercised in making a moral evaluation of so-called apostasy in the pit."The men of 1643 came to Japan knowing what awaited them, to seek out a lost brother. What happened to them afterwards in Kohinata is known only from their jailers.
The last missionary
With the death of the last of the 1643 group in 1701, Shinoda writes, the compound had no more prisoners. He adds that as news of the priests' apostasies reached Rome, the Holy See gave up sending missionaries to Japan around the middle of the seventeenth century.
Then came . Born in Palermo in Sicily in 1668, a diocesan priest who as a young man held a senior post in the Roman Curia, he came to care for the persecuted Japanese faithful, of whom nothing had been heard for more than fifty years, and asked Pope Clement XI to send him.After four years in he sailed in August 1708, and after fifty days at sea landed alone on Yakushima, with his hair dressed in a topknot and a sword at his side, in the clothes of a samurai. The first person he met, a farmer named Tōbei, was frightened by his strange appearance and reported him.Kishino Hisashi in the Heibonsha encyclopedia writes that he was taken at once and sent by way of to Edo, where he was confined in the Kirishitan yashiki.He arrived in 1709.
There the scholar and statesman Arai Hakuseki questioned him in four sessions.Shinoda writes that Hakuseki was impressed by Sidotti's character and learning and that the two treated each other with respect.From the interrogations Hakuseki wrote Sairan igen (1713), a geography of the world, and Seiyō kibun, an account of the questioning, the world and the Christian religion.Ebisawa writes that Hakuseki, under Sidotti's influence, rejected the theory that Christianity aimed to invade Japan, widened Japan's view of the world, and opened the way for Western learning.
Bishop Nakano Hiroaki of , whose diocese includes the islands of Tanegashima and Yakushima, recalled in October 2026 one of Hakuseki's questions. Did it not grieve his family, the Confucian asked, that he had left them to risk his life abroad? Sidotti answered that the bond of family could not be cut, but that his family thought it an honour that he was sent abroad by the Pope and the Church, and agreed.
"He baptised them"
Sidotti was not tortured, Shinoda writes.But in 1713 the couple who looked after him, Chōsuke and Haru, declared that he had baptised them.Bishop Nakano explains that they had earlier heard the catechism from an apostate priest but had never been baptised, and asked Sidotti; and that, though they knew it was strictly forbidden, they told the officials openly.All three were shut in an underground cell. Chōsuke died first.Sidotti died of weakness on the 21st day of the 10th month of 1714 by the old calendar, aged forty-seven, a little over six years after he had reached Japan.The Tokyo pilgrim guide says simply that he was strictly watched and died in prison.Bishop Nakano calls him a Servant of God, and writes that he "was martyred in Edo."
Shinoda adds that Chōsuke and Haru were children of Christian parents who had been executed, and had lived in the compound since Chiara's time.The last missionary of the ban had found, inside the prison itself, a family of the faithful.
The end of the compound
The cells burned in 1724 and were never rebuilt, and with no more prisoners the compound was abolished in 1792 together with the office of religious inspection.The land was divided among the shogun's retainers.
The Madonna of the Thumb
Sidotti had carried a painting with him to Japan. The Tokyo pilgrim guide tells its later story: when the picture of Our Lady of Sorrows, the "Madonna of the Thumb," was found at the Tokyo National Museum in 1948, it was called "the Santa Maria of Edo." The Himonya Catholic church in Meguro, then being built, was dedicated to this Madonna; the original is kept at the museum, and a copy can be seen at the church.
The bones
In July 2014, Shinoda writes, archaeologists working for Bunkyō's board of education on a building site at Kohinata 1-chōme 23 found three graves.An 1811 text, the Kohinata-shi, recorded that Sidotti and the couple Chōsuke and Haru were buried in the compound.The graves lay in a straight line from east to west. One was an ordinary round tub coffin of the Edo period; the other two were rectangular, unusual for the time, and turned out to be a long storage chest and a box reused as coffins.DNA analysis showed that the man in the middle grave was European, of the genetic type of present-day Italians; the man in the tub coffin was Asian; the third was judged by her bones to be a woman. The team concluded that the middle grave was Sidotti's, and that the others were probably Chōsuke and Haru.Bunkyō ward announced the finding on 4 April 2016.
Shinoda wonders why Sidotti and Haru were laid out at full length in chests while Chōsuke was in a tub coffin. Perhaps, he suggests, having seen Chōsuke buried, Sidotti asked for the Catholic manner of burial, laid out straight, and chests were used because no Western coffin could be had.
So the prison that was meant to make priests disappear kept, under its soil for three hundred years, the bones of its last missionary lying beside the two Japanese he had baptised.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Chōsuke and Haru's deaths. Shinoda: Chōsuke died before Sidotti; no record for Haru. Bishop Nakano: both died after seven months, Sidotti two weeks later. .