"Where is the statue of Santa Maria?"
On the afternoon of , a dozen or so men, women and children stood at the gate of the new church on hill in . Father opened the gate and went to the sanctuary, and they followed him. When he had prayed a little, a woman of forty or fifty came up to him, put her hand on her heart and said: "All of us here have the same heart as you." They were from , she said, and in Urakami almost everyone had the same heart. Then she asked at once: "Where is the statue of Santa Maria?" Petitjean was so moved that he wrote her words in his French report in Japanese, spelled out in Roman letters: "Santa Maria gozo wa doko?" He took them to the altar where the statue of Our Lady stood.
Nine years before, the officials of the had taken away the images in front of which the Urakami Christians had prayed to her.
Why Kannon
Kannon, known in China as Guanyin, is the bodhisattva of compassion. The Tokyo National Museum explains that in East Asia at the time it was the custom to show Kannon in the form of a woman. There were many types: Kannon in white robes, Kannon seated at ease by the moon in the water, Kannon who grants children, Kannon with a fish basket.Some showed a gentle woman holding a child in her arms. In Japan these were called Koyasu Kannon, Kannon of easy childbirth, or Jibo Kannon, Kannon the merciful mother.
Once the faith was forbidden, a Christian could not keep a statue of the Virgin in the house. Miyazaki Kentarō writes that in the great majority of cases the hidden Christians chose instead real Buddhist images like these, and venerated Mary through the gentle figure of Kannon.Renata Cabral Bernabé notes that Christian objects had become so well known in parts of Kyushu that it was too dangerous to make or keep them, and that "Maria Kannon" figures have been found among the hidden Christians of the , , , Amakusa and .To an outsider they were ordinary Buddhist figures; the difference lay only in the heart of the person praying.
In time these figures became one of the two treasures of the hidden communities. Miyazaki writes that in Nagasaki, Sotome and the Gotō Islands the central objects of belief were the ochō, the church calendar of 1634 that told the faithful when to keep the feasts and fasts, and the Maria Kannon.
Porcelain from Dehua
The best known Maria Kannon are figures of white porcelain from the kilns of Dehua, in Fujian province in southern China.The Tokyo National Museum notes something remarkable about them: among the white porcelain Kannon figures made there in great numbers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were images of Mary, entered in lists of goods for export to the West as "Sancta Maria".Figures of this kind, the museum says, seem to have reached Sotome and Urakami in the middle of the seventeenth century.Recent X-ray scanning at the museum showed that several of them were pressed in the same kind of two-part mould, with the child and the attendant figures added by hand, and that some had once been painted or gilded.
Andrew Oberg, describing the figures on show at the Museum in Nagasaki, notes that most were made in China of porcelain, but a few were ordered by local people from potters in Hirado. One, made of clay by a Japanese craftsman, shows a mother with her kimono opened, nursing her child.
He describes the general look of them: a calm, peaceful woman, seated or standing, eyes closed, her head covered by a crown or a shawl, her hands folded or her right palm turned outward towards the viewer in greeting. Some hold a child in her arms.A Catholic who has prayed before an image of the Madonna and Child will recognise at once what the Urakami families saw in them.
Hantamaruya
The figures were kept in families and handed down from parents to children.Their story becomes visible only when the authorities caught up with them.
The Japan Tourism Agency's account of the Urakami crackdowns explains the delicate situation in which the families lived. The shogunate's officials were prepared to leave hidden Christians alone so long as they did not show their faith openly. From the late eighteenth century, however, the Urakami villagers were repeatedly denounced by informants. In 1790 nineteen villagers of Yamazato were accused before the magistrate, and in 1839 there seems to have been another round of arrests and releases; each time, to keep the matter from growing, the officials avoided formally recognising them as Christians.In 1856, in the third crackdown, the informants' reports led to the arrest of one leader after another, among them the physician Kataoka Shunmin and his son, and the Kichizō, keeper of the community's church calendar. Several of those arrested died in prison under harsh interrogation.The magistrate Okabe Nagatsune, who questioned Kichizō, made a detailed record of how the Christians practised their faith, and many images hidden in Urakami houses were confiscated, among them white porcelain Maria Kannon and a small metal figure of "Inashio", Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus.In the end, the JTA notes, the affair was treated officially not as a case of Christianity but of a vague "foreign heresy".
The record kept the Christians' own name for her. Kichizō, the museum records, stated that his image was "one standing white-fired figure of the Buddha called ", that is, Santa Maria.Miyazaki adds from the same interrogations that some of the Urakami faithful called "Hantamaruya" the principal image and "Jizous", Jesus, the image beside it.The figure that the Tokyo National Museum identifies as Kichizō's, catalogue number C-600, is 41.8 centimetres high.The magistrate's report, as the Catholic historian Urakawa Wasaburō printed it in 1927, shows what the officials made of such figures. They had the seized images examined by monks of two Nagasaki temples, Shuntokuji and Kōtaiji. The monks reported that the figures called Hantamaruya were images of Kannon, that the mother holding a child was "entirely an image of Kannon", and that nothing about them looked suspicious.To the officials they were Buddhist statues; to Kichizō, the mother holding a child was Mary caring for the Lord as an infant.
Not all the figures were found. The Japan Tourism Agency records a small Maria Kannon of about the seventeenth century, now at the Sōtō Zen temple of Tenpukuji in Kashiyama, which the Urakami Christians are believed to have taken there for safekeeping during the crackdown of 1856. The temple had a policy of tacit tolerance towards the Christians.It is a small grace in a hard story: a Buddhist temple sheltering Our Lady for her children.
Mother of mercy
Why did Mary come to mean so much? Miyazaki suggests an answer. Christians who were forced every year to tread on the fumie and deny God came to fear the Father as a stern judge, and the centre of their faith moved, without anyone deciding it, towards the boundless gentleness and forgiveness of the Mother.That is his interpretation. A Catholic reader may see it differently: the Church had taught these people to call Mary the Mother of Mercy, to pray the Salve Regina and to ask her to pray for them "now and at the hour of our death". Cut off from the sacraments, they did exactly what the Church had taught them to do, and turned to her.
From Nagasaki to Ueno
What happened to the confiscated figures? They were stored in the "sect storehouse" of the Nagasaki magistrate's office with the fumie and other seized objects.After the Meiji Restoration they passed to Nagasaki Prefecture, which did not know what to do with them. The Agency for Cultural Affairs' e-Kokuho site records that in 1874 the prefecture, faced with foreigners asking to buy the fumie, handed the whole collection over to the government's Ministry of Doctrine; it then passed through the Home Ministry's office for shrines and temples to the museum that became the Tokyo National Museum.There the objects are designated together as an Important Cultural Property, the "Nagasaki Magistrate's Office Collection of Christian Artifacts".Most of the porcelain Kannon in it were confiscated in the Urakami crackdown of 1856, and the original owners of many are known.From 24 March to 10 May 2026 the museum showed them in a special exhibition with the results of its new research.
The same collection holds a quiet sequel to the story. e-Kokuho records that it also contains crosses, medals and rosaries that Father Petitjean had given to the Urakami Christians, confiscated in 1867, two years after the woman's question at Ōura.Having found the priests again, the families had received new images of the faith; and once more the officials took them away.
So the figures before which the Urakami Christians prayed now sit in a national museum in Tokyo, catalogued as what they were made to be: images of the bodhisattva Kannon. But to the families who kept them through the long night of the persecution they were images of Mary, and the woman who asked Father Petitjean in 1865 "Where is the statue of Santa Maria?" was asking for the same Mother she had always known.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Who supplied the figures. Japanese Wikipedia reports a scholar's view that missionaries may have distributed them just before the ban, or community leaders bought them early in the hidden period. Not yet seen in the scholar's own work. Unverified; left out.