Kurosaki and its hidden Christians

On 3 November 2025, at Karematsu Shrine in the hills above Shimo-Kurosaki, about thirty people gathered for the twenty-sixth San Jiwan festival. Murakami Shigenori, aged seventy-five, the chōkata of the Kurosaki hidden Christians, recited the orasho, the old prayers, for about thirty minutes.¹The festival had been started in 2000 by the local Kakure Kirishitan and Catholics together, to thank the ancestors who kept the faith.¹"We were able to pray properly," he said. There were about forty of them left. "The numbers are getting smaller, but I want to keep it going as long as I can."¹

A few minutes away by car, a red brick church stands beside the coast road, facing the Sumō-nada sea.²³It was built by the other half of the same village: the hidden Christians who, when the ban ended, came back into the Catholic Church.⁴This page is about both, and the faith they share.

The word orasho comes from the Latin oratio, prayer, and Japanese Christians have used it from the first mission to the present day.¹⁶The missionaries taught many prayers; a prayer book printed by the Jesuit press in 1600 lists thirty-five, among them the sign of the cross, the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Creed.¹⁶Under the ban no book could be kept safely, so the prayers were handed down by mouth, in a Japanese full of Latin and Portuguese words.⁷¹⁶What Murakami recites at Karematsu is the descendant of those prayers.

Sotome, the Nagasaki Keizai survey of the area notes, had many Christians from the time of the Christian lord Ōmura Sumitada, and its people kept the faith in hiding through the Tokugawa ban.⁵Kurosaki and its neighbour Shitsu were known as the Christian villages of the old Sotome district.⁴

The tradition is rooted in a place. At the top of Karematsu, the hidden Christians of Kurosaki are said to have gathered in secret before a rock called the "O-en rock", San Jiwan's hiding place, to recite the orasho and pass them on.⁵The present small shrine is said to stand on San Jiwan's grave; around it lie old Christian graves, flat natural stones carved with a cross and simply laid face down, and before it a large rock called the "prayer rock".⁵The survey calls the area a sacred place of the hidden Christians.⁵Shrines honouring Christians are rare anywhere in Japan; Nagasaki City's material, as summarised in our second chapter, says the Kurosaki community built this one in the Meiji era.⁵⁷

The calendar became the centre of hidden Christian life in Sotome. The chōkata, keeper of the book, announced from it the feasts and fasts; baptisms and funerals followed it.⁶⁸Nagasaki Prefecture counts it among the main reasons the Sotome Christians kept their faith for about 250 years.⁶Examples can be seen at the Sotome Museum of History and Folklore and at a small museum opened by residents beside Kurosaki church.⁶

Kurosaki also sent its faith across the sea. In 1797, under the "thousand people" arrangement between the Ōmura and Gotō domains, 108 people from Kurosaki and Mie villages landed on 28 November at Rokuhō in Okuura in the Gotō Islands; most of them, Gotō City and Nagasaki City both say, were hidden Christians.⁹Many of the Christian villages of Gotō descend from such migrants (see The Gotō Islands and the Church).⁹

After the hidden Christians of Urakami revealed themselves at Ōura in 1865, the faith of Sotome came into the light too. A local history site says Petitjean visited Kurosaki secretly and baptised a hundred households; we have not confirmed this in a primary account (Unverified).¹⁰A temporary chapel stood at Kurosaki by 1870.⁴⁵

In 1879 Father Marc de Rotz of the Paris Foreign Missions Society came as the first resident priest of Sotome, serving both Kurosaki and Shitsu.⁴¹¹At Shitsu he built a church in 1882, an aid centre where women learned weaving, dyeing and the making of bread and macaroni, and a sardine-net workshop, to lift the coast out of poverty.⁴¹¹The Nagasaki Keizai survey lists the rest: lithographic printing, the clearing of wasteland, better farm tools and crops, sardine fishing, the churches of Shitsu and Ōno, roads and breakwaters, a nursery, a clinic and a pharmacy, all paid for from his own fortune in a spirit, it says, of service and sacrifice.⁵He died in Nagasaki in 1914, aged seventy-four, and was buried in the parish cemetery on the hill behind Shitsu church; the people still call him "de Rotz-sama".⁵He did not live to see the church at Kurosaki whose site he had prepared; nor did Father Iwanaga, who began it but died before its dedication.¹⁰

Even before he came, the Church had cared for the coast. When dysentery struck the Sotome coast in 1874, the Church's tally for the four summer months recorded 162 patients nursed at Kurosaki, with twelve deaths.¹²

Kurosaki became a parish of its own, separate from Shitsu, in 1887, and its people began to want a church of their own.⁴¹⁰Poor as they were, they began saving, selling sweet potatoes and kankoro, dried sweet potato.⁴In 1897, under de Rotz's direction, they began levelling the site, finishing in 1899.²⁴⁵Then, for reasons no one has explained, the building stalled for about twenty years.⁴De Rotz died in 1914.⁵

Work began at last in 1918 under Father Iwanaga Shinpei, and was carried on by his successor, Father Halbout (バルブ or ハルブ in the Japanese sources).⁴¹⁰By then about 250 Christian households had saved around twelve thousand yen.⁴The builder was the local master carpenter Kawahara Chūzō (1861 to 1939), from a devout Catholic family of carpenters; his father Kawahara Kumekichi is said to have worked with Petitjean on Ōura Cathedral.⁴The parishioners carried the bricks and timber themselves, about 150,000 bricks.⁵¹⁰The church was finished in 1920.²³⁴Nagasaki City's tourism site calls it a "crystallisation of service and sacrifice", built from bricks the faithful laid one by one.²

The design is traditionally credited to de Rotz, and the long nave does recall his church at Shitsu; Halbout's experience may also have shaped it.⁴¹⁰It is a single-storey brick building some 40 metres long, with a tiled gable roof, no tower or rose window, round-arched openings and, inside, a deep three-aisled nave under a ribbed vault of boards.⁴A bell tower beside it, the city says, was set up in the hope that the hidden Christians would come home to the Church.²³A statue of Mary with open arms greets visitors.²

Kurosaki is known far beyond Nagasaki because of a novel. Endō Shūsaku's Silence (1966) imagines a persecuted village called Tomogi, and the old Kurosaki village was one of its models.¹³In November 1987 a monument to the novel was unveiled above the sea at Shitsu in Sotome, carrying the words Endō wrote for it: "Lord, when men are so sad, the sea is so very blue."¹³Silence is a novel, not a history; the faith of real Kurosaki outlived the despair it imagines.¹³

When the Japanese scholar Miyazaki Kentarō counted Kakure Kirishitan households around 2000, he found about fifty in Sotome.¹⁴Today the Kurosaki community numbers about forty.¹The Church has never treated them as strangers. The San Jiwan festival is held by Kakure and Catholics together.¹In 2010 Murakami, then already the Kurosaki chōkata, travelled to the Oseijo festival at Sakaime on Ikitsuki, listened to its prayers with deep feeling and talked long with its people; the Ikitsuki historian Nakazono Shigeo found it moving that people who had held the same faith four hundred years before could still meet face to face.¹⁵

Why did some stay outside when the Church came back? The keepers' most common answer, Miyazaki reports, is that they cannot throw away in their own generation what their ancestors risked their lives to keep; others speak of bonds of family and place.¹⁴It is a loyalty the Church can honour, for it is loyalty to the martyrs' own faith. Many other families of Kurosaki made the opposite choice for the same reason, and carried their ancestors' faith into the parish church they built.⁴¹⁴

A red church by the sea, and a little shrine on the hill: both are Kurosaki's answer to two and a half centuries of keeping faith without priests.