Kyoto (Miyako) and the Church

The Kawaramachi parish in Kyoto tells a story about its own beginnings. In 1866, when Christianity was still forbidden, the priests of the Paris Foreign Missions, who had learned the history of the Japanese martyrs and longed to build a church again in the old capital, had a bronze statue of the Virgin made and named it Notre-Dame de Miyako, Our Lady of the Capital.¹They asked that it be buried on a hill overlooking the city, and Fr Vigroux buried it at Shōgunzuka, on the Higashiyama heights east of Kyoto.¹It was a prayer put into the ground. In 1879 another French priest came to live in Kyoto and dug the statue up.¹The story of Kyoto's Catholics is a story of that kind: of a Church driven out of the capital again and again, and of people who kept coming back.

Xavier came first. Having landed in Kagoshima, he set out for Miyako, the capital, to ask the emperor for leave to preach in all Japan.²Kyoto was a disappointment. The city was half ruined by civil war, there was no way to see the emperor, who in any case had little power, and no way into the great monastery on Mount Hiei; after eleven days he left. As the city faded from view, Schurhammer says, Xavier recited the psalm of the Exodus: "When Israel went out of Egypt."²He learned from it. Kyoto, he saw, could not be won by a barefoot pilgrim, and he changed his approach for the rest of his mission.²

The mission came back in 1559. Fr Gaspar Vilela set out from Funai for Kyoto with the Japanese brother Lourenço, a nearly blind former street singer from Hirado whom Vilela took "to be my interpreter in disputes and conversations."³They obtained an audience with the shogun Ashikaga Yoshiteru and a licence to preach.³The Kawaramachi parish history dates the licence and the opening of a church at Shijō to 1560.¹In 1563 the court astronomer Yūki Tadamasa and the scholar Kiyohara Edakata, sent to investigate the Christians, invited Lourenço to Nara; his preaching turned the investigators into converts, and with them Takayama Tomoteru, lord of Sawa castle, whose son, the future Takayama Ukon, was baptised the next year.³

In 1565 the shogun Yoshiteru was murdered, and in the turmoil the missionaries were driven from the city; Luís Fróis spent almost four years in exile at Sakai, sheltered by the Christian merchant Diogo Hibiya.⁴The way back came through Wada Koremasa, the governor Oda Nobunaga appointed for Kyoto, and in March 1569 Fróis returned to the capital.⁴On 20 April 1569, at the temple of Myōkakuji, Nobunaga had Fróis and Lourenço dispute in his presence with the Nichiren monk Asayama Nichijō; the argument ran to God and the invisible, immortal soul, and Nobunaga went on protecting the missionaries.³⁴

When the capital was rebuilt after the fighting of 1573, the missionaries decided it deserved a real church. Vilela's old building, bought in 1560, had three split beams out of four.⁴Under the Italian Jesuit Organtino, with the help of Takayama Dario and a special permit from the governor Murai Sadakatsu, who sent workmen and even gave money, a three-storey church rose in the city: Our Lady of the Assumption, which the people called the Nanbanji, the "temple of the southern barbarians."⁴⁵Its dates are given variously between 1575 and 1577 (Disputed).⁴A stone marker "near here" still records its site.⁶In 1581 Nobunaga received the Visitor Alessandro Valignano in Kyoto and several times at Azuchi, invited him to court festivities, and gave him a celebrated folding screen.¹²Nobunaga's protection ended on 21 June 1582, when his general Akechi Mitsuhide attacked him at the Honnōji temple in Kyoto and he died there.⁴Organtino was so loved in the capital that people called him "Urugan Bateren," Father Organtino.⁵

The good years ended with Hideyoshi. In 1587 he ordered the missionaries out of Japan; in Kyoto, the Kawaramachi parish notes, the work went on quietly, tolerated.¹Then in October 1596 the Spanish galleon San Felipe was wrecked on the coast of Tosa, and Hideyoshi ordered the arrest of the missionaries and believers preaching openly in Kyoto.⁷Twenty-four were taken: six Franciscan priests and brothers, three Japanese of the Jesuits, among them Paul Miki, and fifteen lay Christians close to the Franciscans.⁷Many were Kyoto people. Paul Suzuki, a catechist of forty-nine, had run the Franciscans' St Joseph's hospital; John Kinuya, a silk weaver of twenty-eight, had moved his shop next to their convent of Our Lady of the Angels.⁷

On 3 January 1597 they were led to Ichijō Modoribashi, a small stone bridge over the Horikawa that had long marked the edge of the capital, and the lobes of their left ears were cut off.⁷The place had been chosen with care. Since the Heian period the bridge had been where criminals were shown to the city, and just to the east, around Aburanokōji and Ichijō, lay the Christian quarter of upper Kyoto, Daiusu-chō; so, as our place guide reads the geographer Asō Masaru's map of Christian Kyoto, the martyrs were shamed at the very door of their own community.⁷The executioner threw them on the ground. A Christian, Victor Noda Gensuke, picked them up and carried them to Fr Organtino.⁷The prisoners were paraded on ox-carts through Kyoto, Osaka and Sakai, and on 9 January set out on foot for Nagasaki, where they were crucified on 5 February.⁷Laudate records the Tradition that the magistrate Ishida Mitsunari, not unfriendly to the Christians, had Hideyoshi's sentence reduced from both ears and the nose to one ear.⁷

After the Tokugawa ban of 1614 was proclaimed in Kyoto, the Jesuits of the capital left on 21 February 1614, and the churches of the region were destroyed.⁸¹The Christians who remained were mostly humble people living along a street called Daiusu-machi, "Deus street," keeping their faith quietly.⁹Early in 1619 the shogun Tokugawa Hidetada stepped up the persecution, and the governor Itakura Katsushige, who until then had looked the other way, imprisoned most of them; on 10 January thirty-six were taken to the Ogawa gaol, and several, among them a two-year-old named Miguel, died there.⁹Hidetada, visiting Fushimi, heard that Christians were still held and in anger ordered all of them executed.⁹

On 6 October 1619 fifty-two Christians, twenty-six men and twenty-six women, eleven of them children, were tied two or three to a cross on the riverbed of the Kamo between Rokujō and Shichijō, near today's Shōmen bridge, and burned.⁹When the fire was lit they called aloud the names of Jesus and Mary.⁹Tecla, wife of the samurai John Hashimoto Tahyōe, died with five of her children, holding the youngest tightly to the last.⁹Two priests hidden in the city, Fr Bento Fernandes and Fr Diogo Yūki, cared for them, buried them and wrote down what they saw, which is why their names are known.⁹The head of the English trading post at Hirado, who was in Kyoto that autumn, wrote that he had seen Christians killed "because they would not give up their faith," and "among them were little children in their mothers' arms, and the mothers cried, 'Lord Jesus, receive the souls of these children.'"⁹Unlike the great martyrdoms of Nagasaki and Edo, these martyrs were all lay people.⁹They were beatified with Petro Kibe and his 187 companions on 24 November 2008, and in 1994 a plain stone of Kurama granite was set up by the river: "the place of the Genna Christian martyrdom." Beneath it, Laudate and the parish say, a white jar holds fifty-two ribbons with red roses, each bearing a martyr's name.⁹

The ban boards came down in 1873.¹In 1879 Fr Villion of the Paris Foreign Missions came to Kyoto, dug up Notre-Dame de Miyako from Shōgunzuka, rented a house at Takakura-Nijō, opened a French school and made it a chapel.¹The little congregation moved twice, and in 1888 it bought land on Kawaramachi; on 1 May 1890 the church of St Francis Xavier was dedicated there.¹The parish kept the fiftieth anniversary of the renewed Kyoto mission in 1930 and its own centenary with a Mass in 1980.¹In 1937 Kyoto became an apostolic prefecture entrusted to the American Maryknoll missionaries, with Fr Patrick Byrne as its first head, and in 1951 a diocese, with Paul Furuya Yoshiyuki as its first bishop.¹⁰The present cathedral at Kawaramachi was blessed on 23 November 1972; the wooden Gothic church of 1890 was taken down and rebuilt at the Meiji Mura museum in Aichi.¹¹¹

The cathedral keeps Xavier as its patron, the saint who came to the capital and left after eleven days.¹¹He had found no way in. His successors found one, lost it, and found it again; and the statue buried on the hill came down into the city where, as the French priests had hoped, a church now stands.