The Nagasaki magistrate (bugyō)

On the hill of Tateyama in Nagasaki, where the Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture now stands, there was once a storehouse called the shūmongura, the "religion storehouse".¹Into it went the things the magistrate's men took from Christians: paintings and medals, rosaries, Chinese porcelain figures of Kannon that the hidden Christians had venerated as Mary, and the bronze and brass plaques of Christ and the Virgin that every household of Nagasaki had to tread on each New Year.¹²³In 1874, after the ban was lifted, they went to Tokyo; today they are in the Tokyo National Museum, designated in 1977 as an Important Cultural Property, the Christian materials of the Nagasaki Magistrate's Office.¹³

That storehouse is a fair picture of the office that kept it. The Nagasaki bugyō was the shogun's governor of the city, and for most of its history one of its chief duties was to find Christians. This page tells its story from the side of those it hunted.

Nagasaki was born Christian. Ōmura Sumitada opened it for the Portuguese ship in 1571 and in 1580 gave it to the Society of Jesus.⁴Toyotomi Hideyoshi took it into his own hands in 1588, and in 1592, the Heibonsha encyclopedia says, he made Terazawa Hirotaka, lord of Karatsu, its first magistrate.⁴⁵The Britannica dictionary adds that the Tokugawa shogunate appointed Ogasawara Ichian to the post in 1603, and that from then on it was held by the shogun's own vassals.⁵

The early magistrates were men of the inner circle. Heibonsha names Hasegawa Fujihiro, the brother of Ieyasu's concubine Onatsu, his nephew Gonroku, and Takenaka Shigeyoshi, lord of Funai in Bungo, as typical: they managed the trade for the shogun, traded on their own account, and "showed great skill" in enforcing the ban on Christianity.⁵Hasegawa Sahyōe, as the missionaries called Fujihiro, was governor when the ban came. In late 1613 he and Gotō Shōzaburō wrote to Christian friends warning them of Ieyasu's anger.⁶In 1612, during the Okamoto Daihachi affair, the Christian lord Arima Harunobu was even accused of plotting to kill him.⁷

When the ban of 1614 reached the city, the magistrate's men pulled down the Jesuit headquarters and eleven churches of the different orders, with the seminary and the college; and on their sites rose the magistrate's office, the intendant's residence and Buddhist temples.⁴The western office, the Nishi Yakusho, stood at the tip of the cape where the Jesuits' Misaki church had been; it is the site of the later prefectural office, and its excavation report is our source for its place.⁸The magistrate governed the persecution from the ground on which the Church of Nagasaki had stood.

Two magistrates of the late 1620s left a lasting mark on Christian Nagasaki. According to the eighteenth-century local history Nagasaki kōsō, Mizuno Morinobu began the treading on sacred images in Nagasaki in 1628.²At first it was narrow: he used it on people who had already renounced the faith, to check that they had not gone back to it, and made them tread on painted scrolls that the Christians themselves had venerated.²The historians Yasutaka Hiroaki and Uchijima Minako note that at that stage it looked more like an administrative check than an instrument of terror.²

The next year his successor Takenaka Shigeyoshi set cast metal images of Christ and Mary into wooden boards, so that many more people could be tested.²These were small devotional plaques, around ten by twenty centimetres, of the kind the missionaries had brought to Japan.²These were the years of the worst persecution. Miyazaki Kentarō records sixteen Christians killed in the boiling springs of Unzen in 1627.⁹When Petro Kasui Kibe and Fr Miguel Matsuda came back to Nagasaki in 1630, the city was in the middle of a fierce manhunt under the magistrate whom Cieslik and Takagi call Takenaka Uneme; Matsuda soon died, worn out in the mountains after his host turned him out.¹⁰

The office itself was a large one. Nipponica lists ten mounted officers and thirty constables under the magistrate, besides the town elders and local officials of Nagasaki, and two offices: the Tateyama office on the hill, and the western office at Hokaura-machi.⁵The magistrate had a stipend of a thousand koku, and, Nipponica adds, gifts and trading privileges on top of it, and probably a good deal of unofficial income besides.⁵In 1633 the office was reorganised, Heibonsha says, with two magistrates, one in Edo and one in Nagasaki, changing over each year.⁵The Yamakawa dictionary describes the new duties of Iemitsu's time: besides the city and the trade, the magistrates directed the Kyushu lords in hunting Christians in western Japan and guarding against foreign ships.⁵Each year from 1633 to 1636 the shogunate sent orders to the magistrates of Nagasaki. Yamakawa summarises them: the search for and arrest of Christians, rewards for informers, and step by step the ban on Japanese going abroad and coming home. The first order offered a hundred pieces of silver to anyone who denounced a priest.¹¹The price would rise for the rest of the century; the board of 1682 offered five hundred for a priest.¹²The Wakayama archivists note that from the end of the Kan'ei era the boards were signed simply bugyō, "the magistrates".¹²

It was at Nagasaki that the last envoys of Macao met their end. In 1640 they came to ask for the trade to be restored. They were held at Dejima and on the sixteenth day of the sixth month were beheaded at Nishizaka with the crew.¹³

Paper wears out under feet. In 1669, under the magistrate Kōno Gonemon Michisada, the old paper images had torn and there were not enough metal ones, so the magistrate had a caster of Motofurukawa-machi, Hagiwara Yūsa, make twenty more in brass.²One account says the craftsmen were made to swear an oath and worked in a temporary hut in front of the Nishi Yakusho.²Nineteen of those brass plaques survive in the Tokyo National Museum; one of them, a Madonna of the Rosary dated 1669, was shown in the museum's 2023 exhibition on the Virgin Mary and the hidden Christians.²³In Nagasaki the treading became an annual New Year event, done street by street.²

For the next two centuries the hidden Christians of Urakami, just outside the city, lived under the magistrate's eye. Three times, in 1790, 1842 and 1856, informers named names and his constables made arrests.¹⁴In 1790 the nineteen accused answered every question with the same words: "We do not know; we have no knowledge of it." In the end a petition went straight to the magistrate, the headman's plot against them came to light, and the nineteen were set free.¹⁴In 1856 the informers knew the secrets, and the arrests reached the community's leaders; among the things seized from the leader Kichizō was "a white-fired Buddhist image called Hantamaruya", Santa Maria, which went into the storehouse with the rest.¹⁴¹

The office's other duty, the defence of the port, could end in disgrace: after the Phaeton incident of 1808, the Ōbunsha dictionary notes, the magistrate Matsudaira Yasuhide took responsibility and killed himself.⁵

The treading ended in Nagasaki with the New Year of 1857, after the Dutch chief Donker Curtius urged its abolition, the Urakami parish history says; a Japan Tourism Agency chronology dates the magistrate's order ending it to 1858. Disputed.²

When the French priests came back to Nagasaki, it was with the magistrate's help that Father Furet obtained land next to the Ōura settlement in 1863, and when the church was dedicated on 19 February 1865 the magistrate sent a deputy.¹⁵A few weeks later the Christians of Urakami made themselves known there to Father Petitjean.¹⁵The office sent spies into Urakami; their report described the secret "temples" with their thatched roofs and foreign images.¹⁶In the early hours of 15 July 1867 the magistrate's men struck all four secret chapels at once.¹⁶The foreign consuls protested, and the American minister came to Nagasaki to visit the prisoners; the parish history notes how much it surprised the magistrate that a great power's representative should comfort farmers.¹⁶

Late in 1867 the new magistrate, Kawazu, sent for Takagi Sen'emon, one of the Urakami leaders. He spoke gently, Sen'emon's account says: he said the Christian teaching was good, and asked only that Sen'emon keep the faith in his heart and outwardly follow the Buddhist way. Sen'emon answered that he could not believe in his heart alone.¹⁷

Within months the shogunate had fallen and the magistrate's office with it, but the Meiji government took up the case and sent more than three thousand Urakami Christians into exile.¹⁶The ban boards came down only on 24 February 1873.¹²

The office that had kept the confiscated images did not outlive the shogunate. The images did. Today the plaques that Nagasaki was made to tread on, and the Kannon figures that farmers prayed to as Mary, are kept and shown with honour. Visitors to the museum on Tateyama walk over the ground where they were locked away.