The Urakami Exiles at Tsuwano, 1868 to 1873

In the summer of 1868 the new government sent the 114 leading men of Urakami away from Nagasaki, to Hagi, Tsuwano and Fukuyama.¹²Twenty-eight went to Tsuwano, a castle town in the mountains of Iwami, by way of Onomichi.²The Catholic historian Urakawa Wasaburō, who gathered the survivors' memories, lists them like a roll of honour: among the old men Magoshirō, Kumakichi, Seishirō, Kunitarō and Sen'emon; among the young men Yasutarō, Wasaburō, Jinzaburō and Tomohachi. They were, he says, "picked men, the firmest believers".³Years later the Tsuwano officials told them they had been sent there on purpose, because the domain had argued for persuasion rather than killing, and the rival domains wanted to see it fail; Urakawa adds that he cannot say whether that was true.¹³

They were lodged in Kōrinji, a disused temple on a hill above the town.⁴At first they were questioned by turns, and they answered with the same confidence their neighbours had shown in Nagasaki. When an official told them that a mandarin tree cannot bear persimmons, so a Japanese must follow the Emperor's religion, they replied that the God who made other countries also made Japan, and that they prayed every day for the Emperor. "If we could be saved by the teaching of the Buddha or the way of the gods, we would not have broken the ban, left our village and our parents, even our wives and children, to come here."³Then the officials changed their method. They took away the mats and cut the food to less than three gō a day of gruel-like barley with a little salt. The men slept in pairs, holding each other for warmth.⁵Within a short time eight of the twenty-eight gave in and were moved to a former nunnery, the Hōshin'an.⁵⁴

For those who still refused there was the sanjakurō, a cage three feet square and three feet high, made of thick pine boards, too small to stand or stretch out in.⁶The first to be put in it was Antonio Maria Wasaburō, aged twenty-seven. Dying, he told Sen'emon, who had crept out through a tunnel the prisoners dug under the floor, that the devil had come to tempt him; Sen'emon told him to think of the sufferings of Jesus. Wasaburō asked that his body not be buried, so that his bones could go with the others when they were all executed together in Edo. He died on Sunday, the ninth day of the tenth month of Meiji 1, in 1868.⁶

Next into the cage was John the Baptist Yasutarō, a man whom Urakawa calls "of very firm faith and high virtue", who took the jobs no one else wanted and gave away his own food.⁶Sen'emon visited him through the tunnel and asked if he was lonely. Yasutarō answered: "Not at all. Every night, from ten o'clock until dawn, a beautiful lady of seventeen or eighteen, just like the pictures of Holy Mary, appears above my head. I am sure it is Mary. In a gentle woman's voice she gives me very good counsel and comforts me. But do not tell anyone of this while I am alive." He died five days later.⁷

After his death six more gave in, and twelve were left.⁷

In the eleventh month of Meiji 2, at the end of 1869, the officials tried the frozen pond behind the temple. On the twenty-sixth Sen'emon, sick with fever, and Jinzaburō were stripped and pushed into it, and dragged out by the hair with a hooked pole when they would not come out; the next day Tomohachi, Sōichi and Jinzaburō's father Kunitarō were put in the ice too.⁹¹⁰The story of that morning is told on the pages for Sen'emon and Jinzaburō.

When the leaders were taken to the lord's mansion and offered sea bream and sake by Fukuba Bisei, the domain's great scholar of the national learning, Sen'emon warned the others not to drink, suspecting a trick. Kumakichi of Sakamoto said a cup of sake could not change a man's spirit, Fukuba tasted the sake first, and they drank; and when Fukuba probed them, they still answered that there was no salvation in the gods and buddhas.¹¹Old Seishirō, dying of dysentery, apologised that he could not stop himself groaning. "My heart has not forgotten. My life is offered to God." On his last night he told the others: "I am going to heaven. When I get there I will ask God to take all eleven of you to Himself, every one."¹¹

Then the families came. Toward the end of 1869 the rest of the village of Urakami was exiled, and Tsuwano, though one of the smallest domains to take the exiles, received about a hundred and twenty-five more, nearly all of them the families of the first twenty-eight.²¹²On the road, when the guards beat small children who could not keep up, Jinzaburō's sister Matsu, a catechist who had become the women's spokesman, told them that in that case the Christians would not lodge in their temples either, and a hut had to be built for them on the beach. Further on, the Christians again refused a Buddhist temple until the officials from Nagasaki promised to hide the altars and leave the bells silent.¹²

The twelve heard they were coming and prayed that they would not, fearing for their souls. Before they were moved to a new thatched prison, Jinzaburō chewed a bamboo stick into a brush, ground charcoal on a tile and wrote with his spit on a sheet of tissue: "You who come after: men, take Saint Paul as your model; women, Saint Agnes. Be patient. The twelve who came first are still here and have not changed." He left it in the latrine. Matsu found it.¹²

The new arrivals were put on a ration of one gō three shaku a day.¹²Officials tempted three-year-olds with sweets. One small child came back and told his mother he had refused: "If I take the sweets I can't go to Paradise. In Paradise there are sweets and everything."¹⁴A twelve-year-old orphan, Suekichi, had oil burned in his hands, kept the faith and later died in the prison.¹⁴Matsu was ordered to tread on a cross in a paper bag; when a guard tried to drag her to it, she slapped him twice.¹⁴

The best remembered of the children is Matsu's and Jinzaburō's younger brother Yūjirō. The officials tied him to a cross of cedar logs on the path where his father would pass, then for fourteen days made him sit naked on the bamboo veranda in the cold, beat him, and doused him with icy water, while Jinzaburō was made to stoke a bath nearby so that he would hear his brother scream.¹⁵When at last he was carried to the women's room, Yūjirō apologised to his sister for crying out. On the eighth day, he told her, he had nearly given up, "but on the roof opposite the veranda I saw a sparrow bring a grain of rice and put it in its chick's mouth. Then I thought of Jesus and Holy Mary. Even a sparrow takes care of its young; how much more will God love me, watching me suffer on the veranda?"¹⁶Near the end he said: "When I go up to heaven I will pray for you all. Don't give up the faith. Teach others well. Don't make children cry; children have no sin." He died on the morning of the twenty-sixth day of the eleventh month of Meiji 3, at the start of 1871 by the Western calendar.¹⁶¹⁷The diocese gives his age as fourteen, Urakawa as fifteen.¹⁷¹⁶

One thing Urakawa notices about Tsuwano is unusual. Elsewhere, he says, those who had recanted often turned against the faithful. At Tsuwano most of them did not. They admired the twelve, and when the prisoners slipped out at night through their tunnels and knocked at the Hōshin'an, they got up, lit a fire, warmed them and sent them back with scraps, bean-curd lees and vegetables. "That the faithful kept themselves alive so long was entirely due to the kindness of those who had recanted," Urakawa writes.¹⁸¹⁹When the time came to go home, one of the faithful, Tomokichi of Hira, gave the recanted a letter to Father Laucaigne asking him to hear their confessions, because they wanted to be Christians again.¹⁹

In 1871 the government's inspector Kusumoto Masataka came, and the rations improved.¹³In the fourth month of 1873 the order came to go home, and the survivors walked, six to eight ri a day, to Shimonoseki and on to Nagasaki.¹³In 1891 Father Villion gathered the bones of thirty-six witnesses buried at Kabuzaka, the next valley, into one grave inscribed "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake".⁸The diocese of Hiroshima now counts thirty-seven witnesses of Otome-tōge and through its canonisation committee is promoting their cause.¹⁷