Terauke: The Temple Certificate System

The idea grew out of the persecution that followed the ban of 1614. Under Tokugawa Ieyasu, Christians who renounced their faith already had to obtain a certificate from a temple to prove that they had become Buddhists.¹In the 1630s, under the third shogun Iemitsu, the requirement was extended to everyone.¹The historian Miyazaki Kentarō gives 1635 as the year it was introduced across the country.²The Japan Tourism Agency's chronology of Christianity in Nagasaki, prepared with the World Heritage council, records that in 1635 the lords and the shogun's direct vassals were ordered to carry out strict inspections in their lands on the basis of temple registration.⁶James Harry Morris, summarising the Japanese scholarship, notes that some historians put the point at which certificates became necessary for every Japanese at 1638.¹

In the same year, 1635, the Tokugawa created an Office of Temples and Shrines, which set up head temples for each Buddhist school; the head temples in turn told their branch temples "to expose Christians in all villages".¹In 1640 a central office of religious inspection, the shūmon aratame, was founded, with Inoue Masashige as its first head.¹⁶

Miyazaki sums the system up in a sentence: everyone in Japan was obliged to become a parishioner (danka) of a temple, a Buddhist priest had to attend every burial, and the burial had to be held with Buddhist rites.²The oldest register that survives is from 1634, from the period when such lists were kept only in Kyoto, Kyushu and other places where there had been many Christians.¹In 1664 or 1665 every domain was told to set up its own office of religious inspection, and from 1671 the registers followed a standard form.¹An edict of 1660, quoted by Morris from the historian Tamamuro Fumio, put the rule plainly: farmers and townspeople were to be investigated by their five household groups and by their parish temples, and anyone whose religion was suspect was to be examined.¹

Morris points out that the system worked twice over: the temple screened the people, and then the village officials screened them again.¹It also tied every family to its temple for life: it obliged them to use the temple for funerals, to take part in its rites and to support it with money.¹Around 1735 a document appeared that claimed to be a shogunal ruling of 1613, the Gojōmoku shūmon danna ukeai no okite. It was a forgery, but it was copied into many registers. It allowed a temple to strike from its books any family that missed the memorial services for its ancestors, that sent only a small gift to the temple, or that showed no respect to the priest when he came, and in effect to brand them as members of a forbidden religion.¹

The system did not stand alone. It worked alongside the rewards offered on public notice boards for anyone who denounced a Christian, the five household groups that were punished together for a hidden believer, and the yearly ritual of treading on a holy image, the fumie.¹²

The system's own makers knew that it could be got round. Inoue Masashige's notes on Christianity, the Kirisuto-ki, compiled by his successor Hōjō Ujinaga, warn that in some domains, once the farmers, merchants and craftsmen had sworn their oaths and been registered with a temple, nobody inspected them again for a year or two. "It is obvious," the text says, "that a lot of Catholics are hiding in places where there is such carelessness."⁴The historian Martin Nogueira Ramos, who quotes this passage, argues that in many domains the authorities and the remaining Christians reached a kind of truce: the warriors controlled outward conformity, and the Christians practised their faith with more and more discretion.⁴

Where the authorities had been shaken, the screw was turned. In the Ōmura domain, after more than five hundred hidden Christians were arrested in 1657 and 1658 around the village of Kōri, the villagers were made to form five household groups, to show the body of every person who died to the Buddhist clergy before cremation, which had also been made compulsory, and to obtain temple certificates; they had also to clean the shrine of their village and take part in its festivals.⁴

So, for more than two centuries, the Christians of Nagasaki, Sotome, the Gotō Islands and Ikitsuki were, on paper, Buddhists. On Ikitsuki, the scholar Sakai Nobuo found, most of them were parishioners of the Zen temple of Eikōji, and they kept up their Christian prayers and feasts while appearing to be Buddhists.⁷The Urakami Christians, Thomas Burkman writes, survived by keeping the outward signs of Buddhist membership: their families were registered at temples and called Buddhist priests for funerals. In some homes, Christian symbols were hidden behind or inside Buddhist images, and Kannon was honoured as an image of Mary.⁵

The funeral was the hardest moment. The law required a Buddhist priest to come and recite the sutras over the dead.²The Christians found a way to answer him. Miyazaki describes how, while the priest chanted, they would gather in a neighbouring house and recite a prayer they called the kyōkeshi orashio, the "prayer to take away the sutra", to undo what the sutra had done; and after the priest had gone, they held a second funeral of their own, in the Christian manner.³The double funeral is still kept by some Kakure Kirishitan today.³

It is easy, from a distance, to call this compromise. It looks different from inside a village where the alternative was death for a whole family and for the four households around it.¹²These people had no priests. They kept the faith with what they had: their prayers, the calendar of the Church, and the memory of their martyrs. In that sense the temple certificate, meant to make Christians disappear, became the outer wall behind which a hidden Church survived.

The end of the system came, fittingly, at a funeral. On 17 March 1865 the hidden Christians of Urakami made themselves known to the French priests of the new church at Ōura.⁵Under the priests' guidance, they learned that a Christian could not keep even outward membership of another religion, and by 1867, Burkman writes, they were refusing to call in the Buddhist priests to bury their dead.⁵The village headman, caught between sympathy for his people and fear of the shogun's officials, tried to make them hold Buddhist funerals while asking the governor for leniency. He gained time, but no more. In the early hours of 15 July 1867 the governor's troops entered Urakami by surprise (Burkman gives the night of 13 July; Father Laucaigne's own letter, quoted on our The Raid on the Four Secret Chapels of Urakami, 15 July 1867 page, puts the raid at about three on Monday morning, 15 July: Disputed).⁵

The arrests went on. On 2 August an Urakami woman who had refused a Buddhist priest for her mother's funeral was summoned before the officials; she stood firm, and was imprisoned.⁵In Ōmura, the French missionaries' letters reported, the inhabitants were told to sign in blood that they were not Christians and to drink water blessed by a Buddhist priest; about 110 men, women and children who refused were imprisoned.⁵

These Christians were doing, openly, what their ancestors had done in secret for two hundred years: refusing to let the sutra be the last word over their dead. The cost was the deportation of the Urakami Christians that began the following year, 1868.⁵

The temple certificate system did not outlast the shogunate by long. The new Meiji government, which began separating Shinto from Buddhism in 1868, discontinued terauke and gave the work of registering citizens to local officials.⁵For a short time it tried a system of registration at Shinto shrines in its place.¹The ban on Christianity itself lasted until 1873.¹

The registers survive in many local archives and museums. To the historian they are a census of early modern Japan. To a Catholic reader they are something more: lists of names under which, in some villages, a whole Church lay hidden, waiting.