To the edge of the world
In the years after the shogunate banned the faith in 1614, Christians from northern Honshu began to cross the strait to Ezo, the island now called Hokkaido.Many went as gold diggers. Gold was an important source of income for the Matsumae domain, and for a time the faith of the miners was quietly ignored.The work was brutal: the mountains were steep and wild, and many miners died in the diggings.In 1628 the domain opened the gold field at Sengendake.
Sengendake is the northern edge of the Christian story in Japan. The miners went there to be out of reach, and for a time they were: the lord said Matsumae was not Japan. Then the persecution found them too. Nothing is left of them but a number, 106, and the memory of a Mass in a bark hut on the Feast of the Assumption. Both priests gave themselves up rather than let their people suffer for them. On a mountain where the gold ran out long ago, pilgrims still climb to say that Mass again.
A priest who was welcome
The first missionary to cross was the Italian Jesuit Girolamo de Angelis, in 1618.He came over from Tsugaru dressed as a merchant, with the catechist Simon Enpo and two others.Travel anywhere in the north was dangerous for a priest under the ban. Angelis went in disguise, crossed snow and ice in the mountains, and pushed into the farthest valleys to find the charcoal burners and the miners.He was the first European to visit Ezo and the first to write a detailed account of it.
His companion Simon was a Japanese from Nozu in Higo, born in 1580. As a child he was given to a Buddhist temple and taught by a monk. When the monk became a Christian and was baptised, the sixteen year old pupil followed him to the font. Two years later he entered the Jesuit college, and he gave the rest of his life to the mission as a dōjuku, one of the lay helpers who kept the Jesuit houses and also preached and taught the faith.The lord of Matsumae, Matsumae Kinhiro, received him kindly. "It does not matter that a padre has come to Matsumae," he told the Christians of his town. "The government has banished the padres from Japan, but Matsumae is not Japan."
Angelis stayed ten days. He heard the confessions of fifteen people and baptised several.He also met many Ainu, and he wrote that, since there were no Buddhist priests among them, the faith could be preached to them.He came back in 1621, and his report of that visit, with a map he drew himself and some fifty Ainu words, went to Rome and was printed in Italian and French. For two centuries, while Japan was closed, it was one of Europe's main sources on Ezo.
The Mass in the bark hut
In 1620 a Portuguese Jesuit, Diogo Carvalho, crossed from Akita in disguise as a gold digger.He wrote to his provincial that fifty thousand diggers had gone to Ezo the year before, and more than thirty thousand that year.He stayed about a week in the castle town of Fukuyama and a week at the Sengendake gold field, and said the first Mass in both.
At the gold field it was the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August. The place is thought to be Hirogawara, below the mountain.Carvalho described it in a letter:
"Not far from the mine we came to a little village of new straw huts, and in the hut of one of the faithful I put on the vestments. Its walls were of bark and its roof was thatched with bark, but it was very clean and hung with cloth, and the altar was well made. There I celebrated the Feast of the Assumption of Our Lady."
He remembered the great churches of Japan, finely decorated, where crowds of Christians had kept that feast with games and music, and he could not hold back his tears. "Was it the memory? Or was it the joy that I was the first to keep this holy day in this newly found land at the end of the world? I did not know."
What became of the two priests
Neither priest came back. In 1621 Angelis was ordered south to Edo.In 1623 the police there tortured a prisoner until he gave up the priest's hiding place, then pressed the master of the house, who promised that the Father would give himself up. Angelis resolved to do so the next morning, so that no other Christian would suffer for him. He would let no one come with him, except Simon, who pleaded so hard that at last he gave in. That night Angelis went round the families accused of hiding him and told them to stand firm. In the morning he and Simon presented themselves to the magistrate.Angelis was burned alive at Fuda-no-tsuji in 1623, in the , with the Franciscan Francisco Gálvez, Hara Mondo and forty-seven Christians.
Carvalho went back to the mines. In January 1624 Date Masamune, lord of Sendai, ordered a count of the Christians. Carvalho, superior of the Jesuits there, decided to stay and die with his flock if the hour came. He hid in a narrow shed beside the house of a Christian named Mathias, in a mining valley, and some sixty Christians from the mining village built huts near him. The officers followed their tracks in the snow, stripped them and tied them up. Carvalho came out and held out his hands to be bound. "I am the father of these poor people," he said.
He was marched through the snow to Sendai. Threatened with the worst tortures if he would not give up his faith, he answered: "My most ardent desire is to be cut to pieces and ground to a powder as fine as tobacco, for the love of my God."On 18 February he and eight Christians were stripped and tied to stakes in a shallow pool dug on the bank of the Hirose River and fed by its icy water.Told again to recant, he said: "I cannot, and I will not. It is a sacred duty not to obey men when their commands are against the law of God."On 22 February they were put back in the freezing water. The Japanese Christians died one by one through the evening, in wind and snow. Carvalho outlived them all, still as stone, and died about midnight. The Christians managed to recover his head.The man who had said the first Mass in Ezo among gold diggers was taken among miners, and died as their father.
The Christians of the gold fields went on without priests. From Carvalho's letters it is known that former dōjuku were working as miners at Sengendake and caring for the faithful there.
August 1639
After the Shimabara rising of 1637 to 1638 the shogunate made the destruction of Christianity an urgent matter, and in 1639 the hunt reached everywhere.In the eighth month of that year the Matsumae domain beheaded fifty Christians, men and women, at the Ōsawa gold field in the east; six more at Hiichi, later Ishizaki, in the west; and fifty at the Sengendake gold field. In all, 106 died.
Their names are not known. The domain's official history, the Fukuyama Hifu, records the executions, but the section on the Christians is missing, so the names and the exact places are lost.One writer suggests that the domain chose to execute outsiders rather than its own townspeople.Unverified: an inference, not a record.
Pilgrims on the mountain
In 1959, for the centenary of the Church's return to Hokkaido, the first memorial Mass was celebrated on Sengendake.It has been held every year since. Pilgrims set out from Hakodate and climb for about four hours, crossing streams and rocky ridges, to the old site of the gold field's guard post, the Kanayama bansho. There a silver cross stands on a rock, and Mass is offered where the miners once received Communion at the risk of their lives.The bishops' national pilgrimage list says that an altar has been set up at the old gold field and that Mass is said there every year.