A small domain in Hizen
Ōmura (大村) was a principality and town in Hizen (肥前), on the western side of Kyushu, whose lords ruled from a castle town of the same name.It was too small to be called a kingdom, and its lords, though independent, styled themselves only princes in their letters.The domain lay around the bay of Ōmura, and its lands included Nagayo, a port three leagues from Nagasaki (長崎).Kōri (郡), near the town, was the seat of a Jesuit residence.On its western border stood Isahaya (諫早), a fortress commanding a state of the same name, which was often hostile.
The first Christian domain
Under its lord Ōmura Sumitada (大村純忠), who has his own page, Ōmura became the first state in Japan where Christianity was the religion of the state.In October 1568 the Jesuit Fr Cosme de Torres came to Ōmura over the mountain road, and the lord gave land for a church.Work began on October 17 in the grounds of Sanjō Castle (三城), and on December 8, 1568 the first Mass was said there.That Christmas Eve the lord staged a play of the Nativity before about two thousand people.
The new faith brought war.Pagan barons, stirred up by Buddhist monks, rose against the lord, and in 1574 the forces of Isahaya burned the church at the foot of his fortress.A monk who put on a captured surplice to mock the preachers was speared by one of his own side, who took him for a priest.Sumitada held out and beat his enemies, until Ōmura became outwardly almost entirely Christian.
After the war, in 1574, the whole domain was made Christian, and those who would not convert had to leave.About sixty Buddhist monasteries were destroyed, their images burned or sunk at sea, while forty churches were built and over a hundred crosses raised.Many monks were baptized, and some of them took on the work of burying the dead and sweeping the churches.The destruction also had a hard side: the bones of Sumitada's adoptive father were thrown into the Kōri river, and Buddhist clergy who refused to convert were killed.The great town of Kōri, ruled by Buddhist monks, was the last to turn; in Lent 1575 Fr Gaspar Coelho baptized nearly ten thousand people there. Ōmura was given the title "first-born of the faith" (translated), the first state in Japan to become wholly Christian.In 1579 about 60,000 of Japan's 105,000 Christians lived there.
A Christian town
In 1578 Fr Afonso de Lucena became the domain's first resident priest; until then most Christians knew only the basic catechism and had no access to confession or the Eucharist.The Christians of Ōmura founded a hospital for people with incurable sores, run by themselves, and a society to ransom Christians captured at sea and enslaved.Fr Alessandro Valignano planned a college there where foreign Jesuits would learn Japanese and the ways of the mission.In 1596 four priests and nine brothers served about 20,000 Christians, most of whom went to confession.
Sumitada's son, Ōmura Yoshiaki (大村喜前), known as Dom Sancho, was still a fervent Christian about 1600, when his fasting during Lent moved his pagan host at Miyako to ask for baptism.His wife Catherine, a sister of the lord of Arima, was called "the mother of the poor" (translated); she died at Ōmura in 1600 and left money in her own hand for a new church.Dom Sancho buried her in a chapel beside the great church and forbade the custom of cutting off the tips of the little fingers in mourning.The new church of about 1601 was described as very beautiful.In 1601 Terazawa (寺沢) asked Ieyasu for Ōmura, but the grant was revoked after Dom Sancho pleaded with him in person.In 1602 five Jesuit priests and their helpers heard 22,000 confessions in a domain that was by then entirely Christian.
Apostasy and persecution
In 1605 Ieyasu took the outer town of Nagasaki from the lord, and Dom Sancho, convinced that the Jesuits had plotted against him, broke with them.He imprisoned some Jesuits, several Christians gave up the faith from fear, and he later abandoned the faith himself.His elder sister Marina stayed faithful; she lived at Tone, five leagues from Ōmura, with a missionary, and her house was like a monastery.
His son Ōmura Sumiyori (大村純頼), baptized as a baby, was severely rebuked by the shogun Hidetada at the New Year audience of 1617 for letting missionaries stay in his lands.He received secret orders to put them to death.The Ōmura martyrs of 1617 to 1630 have their own page: they began with Fr Pedro de la Asunción and Fr João Baptista Machado on May 22, 1617 and included 72 Christians on September 28, 1630.Captured missionaries were held from 1617 to 1622 at Suzuta (鈴田), a hamlet two leagues from Kushima, whose prison also has its own page.The young lord died suddenly in 1619, and the governor Ficoyemon then ran the domain for an infant heir.
The Kōri debacle
From November 1657 the persecution in Ōmura reached its last stage, known as the Kōri kuzure (郡崩れ), when 608 Christians, women and children among them, were arrested.Of these, 411 were executed on one day in 1658 at Ōmura, Nagasaki, Saga, Hirado and Shimabara, 78 died in prison and 99 were released after an oath of apostasy.Afterwards all Christian graves were dug up and the bones thrown into the sea, Christian funerals were banned, and cremation was imposed.In 1637 thirty-nine villagers of Chiwata (千綿) had already signed an oath declaring that they now belonged to Buddhist schools.
The prisoners of 1867
In 1867 Christians of Ōmura brought their children into the neighbouring valley of Urakami (浦上) almost every night to be baptized by the missionaries.In August 1867 the persecution spread to Ōmura: everyone had to sign in blood that they were not Christian and drink water over which a monk had recited formulas.Forty were arrested at the village of Koba, and at Kitamura the Christians, who had signed in good faith, went together to say they had been tricked, and seven were jailed.Soon the women and children were imprisoned as well.
The Ōmura prisoners were not freed in October with those of Nagasaki, because they were under their own lord and not the shogun.They suffered hunger and cold in a prison of ill-joined planks, and children under seven received no food.The poor Christians of Urakami collected clothing worth about 800 francs for them.Of 123 prisoners counted in August 1867, only 78 were alive on January 3, 1869.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- The scale of the 1574 to 1576 conversions. Higashibaba gives 35,000 baptized in 1574; Hesselink 18,000 to 20,000; Cabral 20,000 in seven months; Bartoli over 50,000 in two years; and Charlevoix 60,000 in under two years.
- Murdoch argues from the Jesuits' own letters that most Ōmura converts became Christians from self-interest or necessity rather than conviction.
- The date of the Isahaya attack is given as 1573 by Anesaki and as 1574 by Tronu and Bartoli.
- The year of Dom Sancho's apostasy is given as 1604, 1605 and 1606.
- The reason for the 1605 break. Tronu ties it to the loss of Nagasaki land, while Pagès blames a Japanese priest ordained at Rome.
- The lord who died in 1619 is called Sumiyori in some notes and Suminobu in others; Charlevoix dates his death later and wrongly says the line of Christian princes ended with him; Bartoli calls the infant heir the son of Yoshiaki.
- The first Ōmura martyrs. Fróis records two men of Ōmura, Lucas and Matthias, killed at Isahaya in 1573, and Bartoli names a Giovanni and a Luigi beheaded by the lord of Ōmura about Christmas 1616.
- The date of the first martyrdom of 1617 is given as May 22 in most sources, as May 2 by Wilberforce and as April by Teather.
- The martyrs of September 28, 1630 died in a field near Ōmura in some accounts and in their home villages in Pagès.
- The Kōri debacle is dated 1657 for the arrests and August 25, 1658 for the executions; the year is garbled in one scan.
- The 1867 prisoners are counted as 110 and as 123 in the same book.