A kingdom at the gates of Japan
The Ryūkyū (琉球) islands were a small kingdom, and a Catholic writer of 1856 named one road towards Japan as the way "from the islands of Loo-Choo, adjoining and tributary to Japan".In 1609 Shimazu Tadatsune (島津忠恒), lord of Satsuma (薩摩), sent 3,000 men against the islands with the leave of Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川家康).His army took the capital and brought the king, Shō Nei (尚寧), a prisoner to Japan for two years.Afterwards the kingdom kept its own king and went on paying tribute to China, as it had done since the Ming dynasty.For missionaries shut out of the shogun's realm, these islands looked like a way in.
Dominican friars in the 1620s and 1630s
Dominican friars of the seventeenth century tried to reach Japan by way of the Ryūkyū islands.Fr Juan de Rueda OP was drowned in 1626 at Awaguni (粟国), an outlying island of the group.His martyrdom long remained unknown, until Fr Tomás de San Jacinto OP, sent the same way, learned what had become of him.
In 1634 some Spanish laymen were blown onto the Ryūkyū coast, and many local people came to them in secret, asking to confess if they were priests and describing how the Japanese Church lacked missionaries.This suggested the route to the Dominicans.The last two friars of the order in Japan were martyred that same year, and in 1636 the order chose four Fathers, one of them Japanese, to go back.The Spanish authorities tried to stop them: "The Governor of Manila, on receiving information that a ship had been prepared to take them to Loochoo, had the vessel burned."A second ship slipped past the coast guards.
A new plan from Korea and Macao
Two centuries later, the Paris Foreign Missions took up the idea of an outpost in the islands.In the early 1830s Rome placed the Ryūkyū islands under the new Vicariate Apostolic of Korea as a gateway to Japan.Its first bishops looked instead to the Japanese colony at Fusan (Busan) in the south of the peninsula, and when that failed, Bishop Imbert authorised the society's agent in Macao to send missionaries to the islands when a chance came.
The chance came through the French navy.Admiral Cécille, who commanded the French squadron in China, needed interpreters, and he asked Fr Libois, procurator of the society at Macao, for a missionary who would stay in the islands, learn the language and later serve as his interpreter in Japan.The man chosen was Fr Théodore-Augustin Forcade (フォルカード), who went with a Chinese catechist, Augustin Ko.
Forcade at Naha, 1844 to 1846
The French corvette Alcmène reached Naha (那覇) on April 28, 1844, and six officials came aboard at once.That night they kept the town dark while a small village on the bay was brightly lit, so that the French would take it for the capital and judge the country too poor for trade.At an audience the officials repeated that the kingdom was too small and poor to trade with Europeans.Captain Fornier-Duplan announced that he would leave Forcade as the first imperial interpreter, and when the governor objected that no foreigners had ever landed to stay, the captain landed the two men anyway on May 6, 1844.
At the landing place the priest noticed a cross carved on a paving stone, and he believed it had been put there so that everyone who landed would tread on it.He and his companion were lodged in the Buddhist temple Shōgen-ji (聖現寺) at Tomari (泊), on the edge of the town, with guards all round and minor officials inside.It was an honourable prison: foreigners might walk only on the seashore, and when Forcade went out he was followed and passers-by were beaten away.
For months no one would teach the missionary, but in time a minor official befriended him, and he compiled a dictionary of over 6,000 words.The officials refused him leave to preach, fearing that Japan, the kingdom's only trading partner, would withdraw its ships.One official who spoke with the catechist about God the creator and wrote a Chinese poem in his praise was removed at once and never seen again.Once, when their escort lagged, the two men slipped away and found the villagers kind and unafraid.A peasant told the guard: "We know that he will do us no harm. The officers and attendants that go with him are the ones that we fear."In 1846 Pope Gregory XVI made Japan and the Ryūkyū islands a vicariate apostolic and entrusted it to Forcade, who was consecrated titular bishop of Samos.
Leturdu and Adnet, 1846 to 1848
In June 1846 Admiral Cécille anchored at Port-Melville, the harbour of Unten (運天) in northern Okinawa (沖縄), and proposed a treaty like the one France had just made with China, which allowed Christianity there.The king refused on July 5, 1846, pleading that Japan would cut off the trade on which his kingdom lived.Still, the admiral won the missionaries the right to rent their bonzerie without guards, with teachers, books and their own servants.
Forcade left with the fleet, and two priests of the society, Fr Leturdu and Fr Adnet, stayed on.The promised freedom did not last.On October 23, 1846, a guard hut was built at their gate, with four men to follow them on every outing.When they went out, houses shut and markets emptied, and the teacher they were given was really a spy.
An old former island governor told Leturdu in secret that the Japanese had forbidden anyone, on pain of death, to speak to the missionaries, and that the king could do nothing because a Japanese official at Naha governed.A man of over seventy came from the north with a boy of ten to see the foreigners once before he died, but left before he could speak freely.The priest searched the north for five days without finding him, and stayed convinced that the old man was a descendant of Christians.
Fr Adnet died on the island.His companion judged that it was humanly impossible to make a single convert, because the people were forbidden to listen or speak to the missionaries.On August 27, 1848, the last of the priests left, news that the shogun's government welcomed.In the words of one account, "the attempt to reach Japan through Loochoo was for the time abandoned."
The second mission of 1855
The society came back in 1855 with three priests, Fr Girard (ジラール), Fr Furet and Fr Mermet (メルメ), who landed at Naha on March 2 against the officials' refusals.After Mass they came ashore reciting the Veni Creator and the Memorare, and carried their trunks into the old bonzerie while a monk in a black robe ordered them to leave.The Regent came from Shuri (首里) and wrote that the people had their own religion and did not need Christianity.Fearing that the French admiral would refuse him help against pirates, he let them stay for two or three months.In the end the mission was kept up, with changing staff, until 1862.
The watch was close: guards were posted, an advance party warned people to flee whenever the priests went out, and their servants were changed every month.Rear-Admiral Guérin concluded a convention with the kingdom in 1855 that favoured the missionaries, but France never ratified it.
The mission's one baptism came on Christmas night 1855, when a 22-year-old servant was secretly baptised with the name Francis Xavier.The young man avoided the ancestor ceremony, and his father beat him and swore to denounce the whole family.He then told the priests the law: "Whoever professes Christianity must die with all his relatives or kin by marriage of the first degree" (translated).Soon afterwards he disappeared, and officials said only that he was no longer in the capital.Mermet believed they possessed a martyr, since an apostasy would have been published as a triumph.
The last years, 1858 to 1862
On October 25, 1858, the aviso Régent brought Fr Girard news of the treaties that would open Japan, and of his appointment as superior of the Japan mission.Paris wanted the island post kept, and Fr Mounicou stayed with Fr Furet at Naha.The new superior often said: "Protestant ministers do not go to the Ryūkyūs, but soon they will be in Japan" (translated).
In 1861 Furet and Fr Bernard Petitjean (プティジャン) gave a minister a letter for the king, asking that the religion of the Lord of Heaven be heard.The minister answered that the islanders had followed Confucius and Mencius for centuries and did not need it.In 1862 the French ship Dupleix came without warning to take the missionaries away, and the regent and the governor of Naha were delighted.The government even insisted on repaying 900 piastres for the house the missionaries had built, though they had asked only 600.The ship carried the two priests to Yokohama (横浜) in September 1862, eighteen years after Forcade first landed.Years later Bishop Petitjean, who had begun his work in the islands, still hoped to open a station there, and went to Kagoshima (鹿児島) to sail for them.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- The Vicariate of Korea, with its charge of the Ryūkyū islands, is dated 1832 by Cary and 1831 by Kasahara (ed.); the 1831 date is the usual one.
- Pagès, as indexed by Anesaki, has Fr Juan de Rueda drowned at Awaguni in 1626, while Anesaki's chronology says he was murdered; Leturdu later wrote that a Dominican was recognised and drowned in Ryūkyū in 1630, which may refer to the same man.
- Marnas has the Alcmène sent at the end of 1843, while Cary dates the despatch to April 1844.
- Spinola says Forcade is said to have baptised, in 1850, the Japanese man who had taught him the language; Cary counts the servant of 1855 as the only baptism of the Ryūkyū mission.
- Forcade believed the cross at the Naha landing place was meant to be trodden on; Leturdu saw several more small crosses on paving stones at the entrance of Shuri, and their meaning is not settled.
- Leturdu and Mermet called the kingdom a province of Japan governed by Japanese officers; this is the missionaries' view, written by men kept from all contact with the people.
- Marnas gives conflicting timings for the Dutch shipwreck of 1857, whose Catholic survivors Girard served at Naha.
- Beniowski claimed to have found all the people of one Ryūkyū island Christian; Marnas doubts the claim, though he thought Japanese Christians trading from Kyūshū could have brought the faith there.