Nagasaki: the Christian city

Stand on the little hill of Nishizaka, a few minutes' walk from Nagasaki station, and the whole Christian story of the city lies around you. Below is the long, narrow harbour where the Portuguese ships came in. To the south, on the slope of Ōura, is the church where hidden Christians made themselves known in 1865. To the north, up the Urakami valley, is the cathedral that the atomic bomb destroyed and the faithful rebuilt. On this hill twenty-six Christians were crucified in 1597, and here, almost four centuries later, two popes came to pray.⁴¹¹¹²This page is a guide to that city: not a full history, but a map of where its other stories belong.

Before the ships came, Nagasaki was a poor village of farmers and fishermen at the end of a deep bay, held by a local lord, Nagasaki Jinzaemon Sumikage, a vassal of the Ōmura family.¹Its harbour was its fortune. Ōmura Sumitada, the first Japanese lord to be baptised (1563), was looking for a safe port for the Portuguese trade after a brawl at Hirado in 1561 left fourteen Portuguese dead, and in 1571 the first Portuguese ship anchored at Nagasaki.¹³Six streets were laid out over wheat fields on the cape above the water, named for the places their settlers came from: Ōmura, Shimabara, Hirado, Yokoseura, Hokaura and Bunchi.¹²From then on the great ship from Macau came regularly, and with it the trade in Chinese silk that made the port rich.¹

The town was Christian from the start. In 1580 Sumitada and his son gave Nagasaki and the nearby port of Mogi to the Society of Jesus; the deed, dated Tenshō 8.4.27 (9 June 1580), handed over the town and its fields together with the right to name a captain and to judge.²By then it had more than four hundred houses.²For a few years Nagasaki was a self-governing town of Christian merchants, under headmen, in a land of warring lords; the Jesuits' superiors in Rome and Pope Gregory XIII approved the arrangement.¹²It did not last. In July 1587 Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered the missionaries out of Japan, and the next year he took Nagasaki and the neighbouring village of Urakami into his own domain.¹²In 1592 he appointed the first Nagasaki magistrate (bugyō), Terazawa Hirotaka, and the shape of the city's government for the next two and a half centuries was set.¹

Yet the town kept growing, and kept believing. The Heibonsha encyclopedia gives about 1,500 people at the opening of the port, several thousand under Hideyoshi, 24,693 in 1616, and about 40,000 in 1626, "almost all of them Christians."¹Churches of the Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians, with the seminary and college, made it the heart of the Japanese Church, and the Heibonsha writers note that foreigners of many nations settled among the townspeople, married Japanese wives and worked as innkeepers, interpreters, pilots and doctors.¹

The first blood was shed on Nishizaka. On 5 February 1597 the twenty-six martyrs, arrested in Kyoto and Osaka on Hideyoshi's orders and marched through the winter to Nagasaki, were crucified on the hill facing the harbour; among them were the Jesuit preacher Paul Miki and the Franciscans led by Pedro Bautista.⁴They were fixed one by one to crosses and killed with spears; the Pauline Fathers' summary, cited on our page, says about four thousand Christians watched, and that the bodies were left on the crosses for more than a month.⁴What had been meant as a warning became the city's first shrine.

In 1614 the Tokugawa ban reached the city. The magistrate's men tore 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.¹The excavated remains of one of them, the Dominican church of Santo Domingo, can be seen today in the Santo Domingo Church Site Museum; its founder, Fr Francisco Morales OP, was arrested in 1619 and burned in 1622.²⁰On 10 September 1622, in the Great Martyrdom of the Genna era, fifty-five Christians, priests and lay people, men, women and children, died together; twenty-five were burned alive and thirty beheaded, on Nishizaka or a nearby hill (the site is Disputed).⁵Pius IX beatified 205 martyrs of Japan, including these, in 1867, and he had canonised the twenty-six of 1597 in 1862.⁵⁴

After the Shimabara rising and the expulsion of the Portuguese, Nagasaki became the one port where Japan still met Europe, through the Dutch on the artificial island of Dejima.¹¹⁷For Christians it was the city of the fumie, the image of Christ or Mary that every household had to tread on each New Year under the magistrate's eye.¹⁸The faith did not die. In Urakami, the farming village just north of the city, families went on baptising their children and praying in secret for more than two centuries.⁷⁸With no priest left in Japan, lay officers carried the Church: a keeper of the calendar who knew when the feasts and fasts fell, a baptiser, and a messenger who knew every house.²¹

In 1864 French priests of the Paris Foreign Missions finished a church on the slope of Ōura for the foreigners living in the new treaty port, and dedicated it to the Twenty-Six Martyrs.⁶Shortly after noon on Friday 17 March 1865, a group of twelve to fifteen people from Urakami stood at the door. Fr Bernard Petitjean knelt before the tabernacle, and three women knelt close beside him. "In Urakami almost everyone has the same heart as us," one of them said, and then: "Where is the image of Holy Mary?"⁶It was the discovery of the hidden Christians, and the Church has remembered it ever since as a gift of Our Lady.⁶

The joy was followed by a last persecution. In 1867 the Urakami Christians were arrested, and from 1868 the whole village was sent into exile across Japan, the "journey" (tabi) they remembered for generations; many died before the ban boards came down on 24 February 1873 and the survivors came home.⁷They had nothing, but they built. On the site of the old village headman's house, where their families had once been made to tread on the fumie, they raised a great brick church, the Urakami Cathedral.⁸In the city itself, Fr Shimauchi's church at Nakamachi was blessed by Bishop Cousin on 8 September 1897, the 300th anniversary of the twenty-six.¹⁵Nagasaki had become a diocese in 1891, and in 1927 Pius XI consecrated its bishop, Januarius Hayasaka, as the first Japanese bishop.¹⁵¹⁹

At 11:02 a.m. on 9 August 1945 an atomic bomb exploded above Urakami.⁹The cathedral was destroyed; of about 12,000 Catholics in the parish, about 8,500 were killed, according to the archdiocese's estimate (figures vary and are Disputed in detail).⁹Among the injured was Dr Nagai Takashi, a radiologist who had become a Catholic in Urakami and whose wife Midori died in the blast; from a two-mat hut he wrote The Bells of Nagasaki and urged his neighbours to "love others as yourself."¹⁰Cardinal Gilroy of Sydney came in 1946 to bless a temporary church built in the ruins, and on 1 November 1959 the new cathedral was consecrated.⁸¹⁸On 14 May 1959 Nagasaki became an archdiocese, with Paul Yamaguchi as its first archbishop.¹⁸

In 1950 Pius XII declared Nishizaka a place of pilgrimage, and for the centenary of the canonisation in 1962 the architect Imai Kenji and the sculptor Funakoshi Yasutake built there the monument, museum and church that pilgrims visit today.¹¹In February 1981 Pope John Paul II came to Nagasaki: on 25 February he ordained priests in the Urakami Cathedral, and on 26 February, in falling snow, he climbed Megumi no Oka to greet the elderly survivors cared for by the Junshin Sisters.⁸¹⁶He called Nishizaka a true "Mount of the Beatitudes," words that Pope Francis recalled when he came up the hill on 24 November 2019, after first speaking against nuclear weapons at the hypocenter below.¹²Francis asked that the martyrs' sacrifice be not "a glorious relic of the past" but "a living memory."¹²

That memory is alive in numbers too. The Archdiocese of Nagasaki counts 56,066 Catholics, 4.346 percent of the population, more than ten times the national rate, and second only to Tokyo in absolute numbers.¹³In 2018 UNESCO inscribed the Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region, with Ōura Cathedral among its twelve components.¹⁴To walk from Nishizaka down to the harbour, south to Ōura and north to Urakami is to cross the whole story of Christian Japan in an afternoon, and the pages below take each step in turn.

• The founding and the Jesuit years: Ōmura Sumitada, Dom Bartolomeu, Nagasaki Given to the Jesuits, The Founding of Nagasaki, 1571.
• The martyrs: The Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki, 5 February 1597, Twenty-Six Martyrs Monument, Nishizaka, The Great Genna Martyrdom, Nagasaki, 10 September 1622, Santo Domingo Church Site, Nagasaki.
• The hidden centuries: Urakami, fumie, dejima, Hidden Christians and Kakure Kirishitan.
• The discovery and the exile: oura, "Where Is Santa Maria?", petitjean, urakami-yonban-kuzure, The Ban Lifted, 1873.
• The bomb and after: urakami, The Atomic Bomb and Urakami, 9 August 1945, Nagai Takashi, The Junshin Sisters of Nagasaki, Paul Yamaguchi Aijirō, bishop of the bomb years, pope-francis-2019.