Mary in Japanese Catholic memory

On 17 March 1865 a woman from Urakami knelt beside a French priest in the new church at Ōura and asked him one thing: "Where is the image of Holy Mary?"³⁴The question was a test. It was also a summary of what the hidden Christians had kept for more than two hundred years. They had no priests, no churches, no Mass. They had the sign of the cross, the prayers they knew by heart, and a love for the Mother of God that the persecution had never managed to take away. It is less a single story than a line of moments, each one answering the woman's question in its own way.

The line begins on the day Christianity arrived. Francis Xavier, two Jesuit companions and three Japanese Christians came ashore at Kagoshima on 15 August 1549.¹It was the feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, and it was also the fifteenth anniversary of the vow that Xavier and the first companions of Ignatius had made at Montmartre.¹Japanese Catholics have never forgotten that the Church in their country began on a feast of Mary.

The missionaries who followed taught the new Christians to pray to her from the start. A prayer book printed by the Jesuit press in 1600, the Orasho no hon'yaku ("translation of the prayers"), lists thirty-five prayers to be learned by heart; among them are the Hail Mary and the Salve Regina.²When the ban came and the priests were gone, those prayers, learned by heart, were what the people had left.²

After the last priests were killed or driven out in the seventeenth century, the Christians of Urakami, Sotome, the Gotō Islands, Ikitsuki and other places went underground. They called their prayers orasho, from the Latin oratio, and passed them from parents to children for more than two centuries.²Some of them were Marian. In the settlement of Ichibu on the island of Ikitsuki, a gathering of the old Christians chants some thirty prayers and closes with three sung ones; the last is the "Gururiyōza." It sounds strange at first, but anyone who knows the old Latin hymns of Our Lady can hear in it O gloriosa Domina, excelsa super sidera, "O glorious Lady, raised above the stars," sung to a melody printed in Granada in 1553.²After 1873 many hidden Christians elsewhere were baptised into the Catholic Church, while on Ikitsuki almost none did and the island kept the prayers of its ancestors; but the hymn they keep is the Church's own hymn to Mary, and it has outlived every edict against it.²

Without images of the Virgin they could safely keep, many families turned to something that looked harmless. They kept white porcelain figures of the bodhisattva Kannon, made in southern China, and honoured them as the Mother of God.⁵The records of the interrogations kept the name they used: "Hantamaruya," Santa Maria. When the officials took the figures away in the Urakami arrests of 1856, a villager named Kichizō described his image as "one standing white-fired figure of the Buddha called Hantamaruya."⁵One such figure, identified by the Tokyo National Museum as Kichizō's, is 41.8 centimetres high.⁵The name we use for them, "Maria Kannon," is a later label, and the Disputed section notes what is still uncertain about them; but the devotion behind them is clear in the Christians' own words.⁵

That is why the question at Ōura mattered so much. The church, built by priests of the Paris Foreign Missions, had been dedicated in February 1865 to the Twenty-Six Martyrs.³Inside, at a side altar, was a statue of Mary holding the Child that had come from France with the church.⁴Shortly after noon on 17 March, a group of Urakami villagers came to the door. Fr Bernard Petitjean knelt before the tabernacle, and three women knelt close beside him. One of them told him that all of them had "the same heart" as he, and asked where the statue of Santa Maria was.³Nagasaki City's feature series names her as Sugimoto Yuri.³Petitjean led them to the statue, and they prayed together.³

To find a Catholic priest who honoured Mary was, for the hidden Christians, a sign that this was the faith of their ancestors. The meeting is remembered today as the Discovery of the Hidden Christians, and the statue they asked for still stands in Ōura Cathedral as the Santa Maria of the Discovery.³⁴

The joy of 1865 left a second statue behind. In the months after the discovery, hidden Christians came to Ōura in secret, and one group, the Nagasaki Church Trust records, brought a large sum of money as an offering. When the priests hesitated, the believers answered: "This is not for you. It is for God and for his Mother, Santa Maria. If you use it to adorn the church, we will be content."⁶Petitjean used the gift to order a white statue of the Virgin from France, and on 2 June 1867 it was set up at the church gate.⁶Its base names it Nihon no Seibo, "Our Lady of Japan," and carries in Latin the words IN MEMORIAM INVENTIONIS CHRISTIANORUM, in memory of the finding of the Christians.⁶Six weeks later, in the early hours of 15 July 1867, the magistrate's men raided the four secret chapels of Urakami, and the last great persecution began, ending in the exile of the whole village; the statue the poor had paid for stood at the gate of the church through all of it.⁶⁷

When the Church was free again, Mary went with it into the modern city. In 1930 the Polish Franciscan Maximilian Kolbe landed at Nagasaki with a printing press and almost no Japanese, and within a month he had published a Japanese edition of his magazine, The Knight of the Immaculata.⁸In April 1931 he founded a friary on the slope of Mount Hiko at Hongōchi and named it Mugenzai no Sono, "the Garden of the Immaculata."⁸Ten years later he gave his life at Auschwitz in place of a father of a family.⁸

Three years after Kolbe's arrival, a Japanese bishop made the same dedication. On 9 June 1934, the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Bishop Hayasaka Kyūnosuke founded the Junshin Sisters, the congregation of the Most Pure Heart of Mary, before the very statue of Santa Maria at Ōura.⁹Their founder, Sister Magdalena Esumi Yasu, wrote the prayer that became the motto of their schools: "Mary, the things no one wants to do, let me do them gladly."⁹

The bomb fell on a Marian season. In Urakami the feast of the Assumption, 15 August, was one of the great days of the year, and before a great feast the parish heard confessions district by district. On the morning of 9 August 1945 the cathedral was hearing confessions; the assistant priest was already in the confessional when the bomb exploded.¹⁰The cathedral and most of its people were destroyed.

In October 1945 a Trappist priest born in Urakami, Noguchi Kaemon, came back to search the ruins for anything at all from the church where he had grown up. After an hour and a half he sat down on a stone and prayed. "When I opened my eyes," he wrote decades later, "the face of Our Lady, burned completely black, was looking at me with sad, fond eyes."¹¹It was the head of the wooden statue of the Virgin that had stood above the high altar.¹¹He kept it on his desk in Hokkaido for about thirty years; from 1975 it was kept by the Junshin college, in 1985 it was shown at the Vatican where Pope John Paul II saw it, and in 1990 it returned to Urakami Cathedral.¹¹It is known today as the Hibaku no Maria, the Bombed Mary.

When Pope Francis came to Nagasaki on 24 November 2019, the first words of his address at the hypocenter turned to Urakami's ruins: "The damaged cross and statue of Our Lady recently discovered in the Cathedral of Nagasaki remind us once more of the unspeakable horror suffered in the flesh by the victims of the bombing and their families."¹²Later that morning he prayed at Nishizaka and led the Angelus.¹²

The woman at Ōura asked where Santa Maria was. The history of Japanese Catholics gives many answers: in a hymn sung on Ikitsuki, in a white Kannon hidden in a farmhouse, in a statue paid for by the poor, in a garden named for the Immaculata, in a congregation founded before her image, and in a burnt face looking up from the rubble. Each answer is the same one the hidden Christians gave: she was with them all along.