The Takaya Headman's Estate: The Fumi-e Ground at Urakami

In 1605 Urakami Yamazato became land under the shogun's direct rule, and a headman was appointed for the village. He was Kikuchi Masashige, a masterless samurai from Higo. His house stood on a rise called Takaya, and he took its name. From then until the end of the shogunate, the parish history says, the Christians of Urakami lived under the headmen of the Takaya family.¹Of the five hamlets of Yamazato, every farming family in four of them was Christian.¹

The house stood, in the parish history's words, on the high, dry, finest ground in the middle of the village. The headmen helped with every arrest and every examination of Christians.²And every New Year they called the villagers to the house to tread on the fumi-e.²

The treading began at Urakami in 1641. Each year, in the first month of the old calendar, the officials went round in order: Nagasaki town first, then Nagasaki village, then Urakami Yamazato and Urakami Fuchi. Young and old, men and women, the sick and babies in arms, every person stepped on the image.³Anyone who would not was known at once for a Christian and arrested.³

For the hidden Christians it was, the parish history says, the saddest and most painful thing of all. So they prayed the Konchirisan, the prayer of perfect contrition handed down for times when there was no priest to hear confession, asking pardon for the treading.³A guide written for the World Heritage pilgrim routes adds what families remember: parents told their children, "You must step on it, but step softly. Try not to step on the middle." Then they went home, prayed the Konchirisan, and washed their feet, weeping.⁴(Tradition: family memory, recorded without a named source.)

Nagasaki's treading ended with the New Year of 1857, after the Dutch factor Donker Curtius urged the shogunate to stop it.³By then the house at Takaya had seen it every year for more than two centuries.

Not every headman was content to watch. In 1790 Takaya Eizaemon wanted eighty-eight stone Buddhas for a temple, and many villagers refused to give money. He denounced nineteen of them as Christians, with the help of an official he had bribed. The plot came out; in 1791 Eizaemon was confined and gave up the headmanship to his son.⁵That was the first of the Urakami crackdowns.

In 1867, when the Christians of Urakami decided to stop pretending to be Buddhists, it was to the Takaya house that ten representatives of the four hamlets went, to say that they were cutting their tie with the family temple; more than four hundred households followed with written refusals.⁶And on 6 January 1870, when the families of the men already sent away were rounded up for exile, they came to the headman's house in groups. Flags marked East, West, South and North stood in the garden, and officials called each name and sent each person to stand under a flag.⁶Kataoka Sada remembered walking through the snow that morning with one daughter on her back and two by the hand, to "the field below the Yamazato headman's house", and then to the government office, praying the rosary aloud all the way.⁶

Three years later the exiles came home to burned and empty houses.⁷They had no church. For Mass they walked to Ōura. In 1879 Aikawa Chūemon of Doi, who had come back from the "journey", arranged with Father Poirier to turn his elder brother Tomohachi's detached room by the river into a chapel for about two hundred people, dedicated to Saint John the Baptist. Father Poirier came to live in a partitioned corner of it.²

Then, the parish history says, "unexpectedly", the finest site of all came onto the market.²The headman Kanjūrō had died soon after sending the Christians into exile.¹⁰His eldest son died in a gas explosion at the Takashima coal mine. The new government had ended hereditary office, and the widow was left with a sick twelve-year-old son and no income. She sold the trees around the house for a while, and then put the whole estate, land and house, up for sale.²¹⁰The parish history tells this plainly and without triumph; it is a hard story for a family too.

The Catholics of Urakami worked to buy it, and on 4 June 1880, the feast of the Sacred Heart, they signed the contract. The price was 1,600 yen; rice then cost 2 yen 64 sen a bale.²⁴¹⁰The Catholic historian Urakawa Wasaburō, writing in 1928, tells the purchase in almost the same words, and the parish history follows him.¹⁰On 7 July, the feast of the 205 Martyrs of Japan, they began turning the house into a chapel, and on 15 August, the Assumption, the first Mass was said there.²The parish history adds one line: this was the place they could never forget, where they had trodden on the image against their will, praying the Konchirisan.²

Why this ground? The Nagasaki heritage guide answers: to build a house of prayer where the treading had been was, for the Christians of Urakami, an act of reparation to God, and a way of not forgetting their ancestors.⁴The guide notes that the same was done elsewhere: Father de Rotz's Shitsu Aid Centre, and Father Halbout's church at Sakitsu in Amakusa, also stand on the sites of headmen's houses.⁴

The next year, 1881, the Catholics of Urakami raised a wooden cross on a hill at Tsuji as a second act of reparation for the treading and of thanks that the persecution was over; it is still called Jūjiyama, the Hill of the Cross.²

In 1888 Father Fraineau became parish priest. The old house was low, leaking and far too small for more than five thousand Catholics, who spilled outside every Sunday. He planned a great church "on this headman's site", where for two hundred and fifty years the cross had been trodden under foot, "in reparation for the sacrilege".⁸The bishop asked where the money would come from. "It will come down from heaven," Fraineau said.⁸It came mostly in five and ten sen coins, which he collected house by house each month, while the children ran ahead shouting that the Father was coming. When stone and brick arrived at the Doi landing, the Catholics carried them up "to the building site on the Takaya hill".⁸Work began in 1895; Fraineau died in 1911; the cathedral was dedicated on 18 March 1915 and its two towers were finished in 1925.⁸(Disputed: Urakawa, writing in 1928, dates the completion and dedication to 17 March 1914.¹⁰) Fraineau did not live to see it. He gave his own money, lived in great poverty and worked for sixteen years on the building; he died of overwork on 24 January 1911, aged sixty-four, after thirty-eight years in Japan. His successor, the Belgian Father Laget, simplified the design, left out the central dome and hurried the work, because every Sunday more of his people stood outside the old house.⁸The old headman's house, moved behind the church in 1902, served as a chapel until the cathedral was finished and then as a catechism hall.²

The little chapel at Doi was not forgotten either. When it was falling apart in 1897 and the parish elders decided to pull it down, old Takagi Sen'emon objected: it should be kept as a memorial of the faith, or repaired and given back to its owner. In the end it was rebuilt as a small house for Tomohachi, who at first refused to take back what he had given to God.²

In August 1920, fifty years after the exile, Bishop Combaz (コンパス in the parish text) said a memorial Mass at the cathedral, and many survivors of the "journey" came. After Mass a monument was unveiled, named "The Cornerstone of Faith" (信仰の礎), and everyone shared a meal.⁸Men and women who had been sorted under flags in the headman's garden in 1870 stood on the same ground fifty years later, beside the church they had built there.

At the front of the cathedral, on the right, stood a persimmon tree, and beside it a large natural stone. That spot, the parish history says, was the entrance of the old headman's house. The ancestors were tied to that tree and tormented at their examinations. The stone was the headman's water basin, which had watched it all in silence.⁸⁹(Tradition: the parish history gives this as handed-down memory, "it is said".)

On 9 August 1945 the atomic bomb destroyed the cathedral, and the persimmon tree burned; the old headman's house, the catechism hall, burned too.²⁹In August 1946, to restart the round of Communion visits to each district, young men dug the root of the persimmon tree out of the ashes and made it into a cross. It went from district to district every week. The parish says the cross is still used every Sunday, passed from district to district as the baton of the liturgy rota.⁹

The wood that had once held the persecuted now leads the parish to the altar. The ground where Urakami trod on the image is the ground where it kneels.