The Nanbanji: The Jesuit Church of the Assumption in Kyoto

The first Jesuit church in Kyoto (京都) was a house that Fr Gaspar Vilela began to use about 1560, at Shijō-bōmon Ubayanagi in the lower town.¹²³Francis Xavier (ザビエル) had hoped in 1549 for a church of Our Lady in the capital, so that sailors caught in storms could pray to "Our Lady of Miaco".¹²The house the fathers had was a patchwork of old boards, so flimsy that the faithful had to leave it whenever the wind blew.¹³Buddhist priests mocked it as a rustic hut beside their temples.¹⁴Fr Organtino (オルガンティノ) wrote that many judged the Christian God no higher than the poor church they saw dedicated to him.¹⁵

Fr Luís Fróis (フロイス) met Oda Nobunaga (織田信長) at Easter 1569 and obtained patents for a residence.¹⁶He sent Brother Lourenço, the famous Japanese Jesuit, to Wada Koremasa (和田惟政) at Takatsuki (高槻) to ask for land for a church.¹⁷Even so, the Jesuits did not acquire a new plot until 1575.¹⁶A plan to buy and move a Buddhist temple failed, so the fathers resolved to build a new church instead.¹⁸

Work on the new church began in late 1575 under Fr Organtino, with Dario Takayama as his partner in the project.¹²⁴The Jesuit superior, Fr Francisco Cabral, approved the work in advance and gave 600 taels toward it, and the Christians gave 2,500 cruzados.¹⁹⁶Christians from the three provinces around the capital, Ōmi (近江), Kawachi (河内) and Settsu (摂津), competed to share in the work.²⁰Lords with fifteen to twenty thousand vassals carried stones and timber beside the poor, and a noble knight named Giorgio carried loads until his shoulders swelled.²¹²²When work stopped for lack of money, the same knight secretly gave a Jesuit brother the gold fittings of his sword to sell.²³

Fifteen hundred men carried logs down to the river and loaded boats standing naked in the cold water, and one precious wood was brought from over 150 miles away.²⁴Poor women brought cooking pots from home and fed the workers, while noble women made the altar furnishings.²⁴The Christians would not allow any piece of timber that had served another use.²⁵Raising the main beams took seven hundred men, and pagan neighbours who had once plotted to burn the fathers came unasked to help.²¹¹⁸The pagan viceroy of the city offered a thousand of his own men and gave the fathers 20,000 copper coins.²⁶

Christians told of signs during the work: when a fire spread toward the unfinished church, they said, a sudden contrary wind turned the flames back.²⁷²⁸A falling roof tile struck the bare head of the pagan master builder and left only a scratch, and he was later baptized.²⁹²⁷

The church was a three-storey building, made tall because its lot was narrow, with the chapel of Our Lady of the Assumption on the first floor.⁴¹Its height troubled the neighbours, who complained that priests and foreign visitors could look down on the women of the district.¹⁶³⁰Stirred up by Buddhist priests, about forty nobles of the city magistracy took a rich gift to Nobunaga's court in Ōmi and asked that the part of the church taller than other buildings be cut down.²⁵³¹¹⁸

The city governor, Murai Sadakatsu (村井貞勝), backed the church despite these objections.²The governor called the complainants small-hearted and envious, and then, though old and ill, followed them in winter to the court and saw to it that they were not even heard.²⁵³¹Ashamed, they slipped back into the city by night.²⁵In 1577 residents again asked the governor to pull down Christian buildings modelled on the Nanbanji, and some destroyed such buildings themselves.³²Fr Valignano (ヴァリニャーノ) later called the church very noble, tall and dominating the houses around it.¹⁹

The church was dedicated to Our Lady of the Assumption on August 15, the feast on which Xavier had arrived in Japan, in the middle of the 1570s.⁵⁶²Fr Organtino said the first Mass and led the solemn dedication, and a formal opening followed at Christmas.⁶⁵¹⁸After the general communion, Dario, Lione and other leading knights lay face down before the altar and asked God to take them now, since they had what they lived for.³³One of the fathers wrote that two poor foreigners consecrating a church before the court and the Buddhist clergy was "just as if two Saracens were building a mosque in Rome or in Lisbon" (translated).³³Among the first baptized afterwards were a relative of the viceroy and a Buddhist monk, named Rocco, who had long spied on the Jesuits hoping to find secret vices.³³

The church became known as the Nanbanji (南蠻寺), the Temple of the Southern Barbarians.³⁴³⁵According to Japanese tradition, it was first named Eiroku Temple (永祿寺) after the era name, and the emperor's council later had Nobunaga change the name.³⁶³⁵³⁷The street where it stood was called Daiusu machi, the street of God.⁶³⁸A painting titled Miyako no Nanban-ji, held by the Kobe City Museum, shows the church.⁴

The Nanbanji stood in the merchant heart of the lower city, Shimogyō (下京), between Muromachi (室町) and Shinmachi streets near Shijō (四条).⁷⁸¹This district, along the main road between Sanjō and Gojō, had survived the age of civil war as a walled island of trade.⁸The church's usual address, Shijō-bōmon, was already a named place in 1381.³⁹The site lies today at Takoyakushi Muromachi nishi-iru.¹

The church stood only one street from the Honnōji (本能寺), where Nobunaga was staying in June 1582.⁴⁰⁴¹Before dawn on June 21, 1582, a priest vesting for an early Mass was told to wait because of a tumult at the palace, and then came gunfire and flames.⁴²⁴¹The men of Akechi (明智) attacked Nobunaga, who fought back, withdrew wounded and died by his own hand or in the fire.⁴¹A priest in the church saw most of the fighting, and afterwards the rebels' heads were piled where the lord had fallen, until the stench drove the fathers to close their doors.⁴³The Jesuits expected to be killed, since their church was so easy to see, but the rebel leader had criers proclaim that no one need fear.⁴⁴

Toyotomi Hideyoshi's (豊臣秀吉) edict of 1587 led to the confiscation and demolition of Christian buildings, including the famous Nanbanji.⁹He ordered the church destroyed in March 1588.⁴⁵Arima Harunobu (有馬晴信), seeing how cramped the Jesuit house in the capital was, gave his own palace by the river to Fr Valignano for a seminary and a fitting church.⁴⁶After Sekigahara (関ヶ原), Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川家康) allowed the Jesuits back into Kyoto.⁴⁵By 1604 the fathers preached openly in two churches in the city.⁴⁷

About 1605 the crowds at the public disciplines grew so large that a new, larger church was built, with 400 scudi from Arima Harunobu, and its first Mass was said at Christmas 1605.⁴⁸⁴⁵A Buddhist priest complained that the Jesuits were also building a church in the upper town, Kamigyō (上京), without leave, but the shogun took no notice.⁴⁹A Jesuit college in the city drew people of all classes, some for the faith and others to learn mathematics and astronomy.⁵⁰In 1614 the Jesuits were allowed a public farewell Mass, then stripped the altars while the people wept.⁵¹Soon after, the official the missionaries called Sangamindono had soldiers pull down the Jesuit church, the college and two nearby chapels, and stack the timber outside the city like pyres.⁵²Japanese records say the fathers' two temples, at Nishinokyō near Kitano (北野) and on Shijō-machi, were burned that year.⁵³⁵⁴

A bronze bell dated 1577, kept at Shunkōin (春光院) in Myōshinji (妙心寺), was long said to come from the Nanbanji, but a document found at the temple points to another source.¹⁰¹¹A lacquered host box marked IHS, found at Nagoya (名古屋) in 1918, was linked by one scholar to the Kyoto church.³⁴⁵⁵Most Christian tombstones in the city have been found in the north-west of the city, which some take as a sign of where later cemeteries and churches stood.⁵⁶⁵³Street names such as Daiusu-chō, the street of Deus, survived on old maps from the Kan'ei era into the Kyōhō era, though they did not always mark a church site.⁵⁴⁵³In the Tokugawa period the church's name lived on in Nanbanji novels.⁵⁷