A price list by the road
In the British Museum there is a plank of wood, written in ink, that was put up in Japan in 1682.Its words were set up, in one copy or another, at crossroads, by village headmen's houses and near government offices all over the country, where everyone would see them every day.It is a price list. In the version of the fifth month of Tenna 2 (1682), it reads:
The Christian religion has been forbidden for many years. If anyone suspicious is found, report him. As a reward: for denouncing a bateren (priest), 500 pieces of silver; for denouncing an iruman (brother), 300 pieces of silver; for denouncing a tachikaeri (one who gave up the faith and returned to it), the same; for denouncing a dōjuku (catechist) or an ordinary believer, 100 pieces of silver. Even one who is himself a catechist or believer, if he comes forward, will receive up to 500 pieces of silver, according to the case. If a Christian is hidden and is discovered from elsewhere, the headman of that place, the five household group and the whole family will be severely punished.
This page is about those boards, the , and the silver they offered: what they said, how the price changed, and what it meant for the people whose names were worth so much.
Thirty pieces of gold
Paying informers was older than the boards. Morris, following the Jesuit historian Hubert Cieslik, tells how the in 1623 began when a servant of the Christian samurai Hara Mondo, a convert in money trouble, gave the governor of Edo a list of the Christians and missionaries in the city in return for the reward.The Jesuit annual letter describes what happened the day after the first executions, on 5 December 1623: before a vast crowd the main informer was given his reward, the fine house of one of those executed and thirty pieces of gold, and the people were told that anyone else who gave information would be paid the same way.Two years later, Morris notes, the reward for informing on a priest was raised to one hundred pieces of silver, and in some places three hundred.
Where it began is not certain. Miyazaki Kentarō dates the system to in 1619, extended to the shogun's own lands in 1633 and to the whole country after the .Yamamoto Hidetaru, writing in 1922, says it was used first in in 1622 and in Nagasaki in 1626, and after Shimabara was spread to every province, with boards set up at all the important places.The Wakayama Prefectural Archives say it began in Nagasaki around 1622.(See Disputed.)
Who was on the list
The words on the board were the Church's own words, borrowed from Portuguese. Yamamoto explains them: bateren, from padre, meant a father, a priest or missionary; iruman, from irmão, a brother, a religious brother; dōjuku, literally "one who lodges with", meant the young men trained in the Church's schools as seminarians or catechists; and shūmon, "the sect", meant the ordinary faithful.In other words, the board followed the shape of the Church itself, from the priest at the altar to the catechist who served beside him and the farmer who prayed in his own home, and set a value on each.
The headings at the end changed too. The Wakayama archivists note that the early boards were signed with the titles of the shogun's senior councillors, but that from the end of the Kan'ei era (1624 to 1644) they were signed simply bugyō, "the magistrates".And the last line of the board made the whole village answer for a hidden Christian. A family that sheltered a priest put at risk not only itself but the headman and the four households of its five household group.That was the point. A board on a post could not catch anyone by itself. It worked by making every neighbour a watcher.
The price goes up
Yamamoto set out, from the boards themselves, how the price changed.On the board of Kan'ei 15 (1638), a priest was worth 200 pieces of silver and a brother 100. By Jōō 3 (1654) these had risen to 300 and 200; by Enpō 8 (1680), to 500 and 300. The reward for an ordinary Christian, fifty pieces of silver (or, by one reading of his table, thirty) on the earlier boards, rose to 100 on the board of 1682.That same board, Yamamoto points out, added a new line: the tachikaeri, the Christian who had once renounced the faith under pressure and then come back to it, was now valued like a brother, at 300 pieces of silver.
The Wakayama archivists, trying to give a sense of these sums, reckon that 500 pieces of silver came to about 358 ryō of gold, while warning that the value of money then cannot simply be compared with today.It was, in any case, a fortune for a villager.
The board of 1682 offered the same reward to a Christian who would betray other Christians, and Yamamoto drew the conclusion: the law not only forgave a believer who informed, it paid him, and so held out profit as a reason to give up the faith.He also wrote that some domains added their own money to the reward on the board.
One board in Wakayama
The Wakayama Prefectural Archives keep a paper copy of the 1682 text that was handed down in the fishing village of Ōkawa-ura, now part of Wakayama City.Its story begins in hope. In 1605 the lord of Kii, Asano Yoshinaga, was cured of a skin complaint by a Franciscan brother named Andrés while he was in Edo; the next year he invited Andrés and Father Luis Sotelo to his castle town. In the autumn of 1606 a small church and a hospital were built near Wakayama Castle, and, the archives record, 300 to 500 people a day came to hear the sermons.
After the ban of 1613 to 1614 the church was closed. The new lords of Kii, the Tokugawa of Kii, tolerated the Christians at first, then from 1631 ordered religious inspections. After Shimabara, rewards in silver were offered for informers in Kii too, and Christians were arrested in the hill village of Nagura.The 1682 text reached Ōkawa-ura as an order of the shogunate passed on in the names of the domain's two senior councillors, Mizuno and Andō.The archivists point out what it was meant to do: not only to remind people that the faith was forbidden, but to make them watch each other.
The boards return
The boards stayed up through the whole Tokugawa period. Burkman notes that in 1664 the shogunate ordered signboards offering rewards for the arrest of Christians, and that the same boards, which also warned against robbery, murder and arson, were put up again by the new Meiji government in 1868, to the irritation of Western diplomats.That was the year the Christians of , who had come forward to the priests at in 1865, were sent into exile.
The boards come down
The exiles' sufferings did not go unnoticed abroad. When the Iwakura embassy left in 1871 to renegotiate Japan's treaties with the Western powers, it was criticised wherever it went for the treatment of the Urakami Christians and for the mass arrests then going on in and around Nagasaki Bay, and was pressed to grant freedom of religion.On 24 February 1873 the government issued Proclamation No. 68 of the Council of State, and the anti-Christian boards were taken down.The National Archives of Japan call it the end of the ban on Christianity that had gone on since the beginning of the Edo period.On 14 March the order went out to bring the exiles home, and after five years away, 1,930 people returned to Urakami.The Japan Tourism Agency's account of these events is illustrated with a picture of the boards of 1868 that were taken down in 1873, from the Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture.
What the boards say to us
The boards were meant to make Christians afraid, and neighbours suspicious of each other. For two hundred and fifty years they put a price on the head of every priest who came to Japan and every family that kept the faith. Read today, they say something else as well. They show how much the Tokugawa feared a handful of priests and a hidden people at prayer. And the line added in 1682, for the tachikaeri, shows that Christians who had given up the faith in fear were still coming back to it, often enough for the law to name them.
Yamamoto, closing his account of the reward system, thought of the oldest such payment of all: the thirty pieces of silver for which, he wrote, Judas Iscariot sold his Master.The Christians of Japan, who knew that story, lived for two centuries beside boards that offered far more.