From "the churches" to the people who waited for them
At 11:50 in the morning on Saturday 30 June 2018, local time in Manama, Bahrain, the 42nd session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee decided to inscribe the "Hidden Christian Sites in the Region" on the World Heritage List. In Japan it was 5:50 in the evening.The committee inscribed the property under a single criterion, (iii), as "unique testimony to a distinctive religious tradition nurtured by who secretly transmitted their faith in Christianity during the time of prohibition spanning more than two centuries in Japan, from the 17th to the 19th century."
That same day the Archbishop of Nagasaki, Mitsuaki Takami, then also president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Japan, issued a statement as the owner of the Nagasaki churches among the sites.He thanked everyone who had worked for the listing and said he was deeply grateful that it would be, in his words, Japan's first World Heritage site connected with Christianity.The Church's joy was real, and so was the long road behind it. This is the story of that road, and of how a nomination that began with church buildings ended by honouring the people who had kept the faith without them.
A campaign that began with churches
Archbishop Takami traced the beginning to 15 September 2001, when a citizens' group, the Association to Make the Churches of Nagasaki World Heritage (長崎の教会群を世界遺産にする会), was founded.In 2007 "The Churches and Christian Sites in Nagasaki" (長崎の教会群とキリスト教関連遺産) was placed on Japan's tentative list for World Heritage.The title itself shows where the hope lay: in the brick and timber churches of Nagasaki, Goto and Amakusa, built after the ban on Christianity was lifted.
The road was not smooth. In 2012 the candidate was examined by the national Council for Cultural Affairs but not put forward, because international rules had changed so that each country could nominate only one cultural site a year. In 2013 the government chose another Kyushu nomination, the Meiji industrial heritage sites, instead.The churches were finally nominated in January 2015, and ICOMOS, UNESCO's advisory body, inspected the sites in September and October 2015.
Then came the setback. In January 2016 ICOMOS sent an interim report. As the mayor of Goto explained to his citizens, ICOMOS acknowledged the property's potential value, but found that the value of each individual component was not sufficiently demonstrated and that the management system had issues. Most of all it observed that the distinctive character of Japan's Christian communities lay in their history under more than two centuries of prohibition, and advised that the nomination be revised to focus on that history.The mayor put the difficulty in his own words: most of the churches had been built after 1873, when the faith became free, and so the nomination had to explain their relationship to the 250 years of ban and persecution that came before."We had placed the churches as symbols of the 'revival' that came after overcoming the hard years of prohibition and persecution," he wrote, "but we could not win that understanding."In February 2016 Japan withdrew the nomination, on the understanding that ICOMOS would advise on a revised one.
A new name, and a new centre of gravity
What followed was not a loss for the Church's story but a deepening of it. In September 2016, to express the property's value more directly, the title was changed to "Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region" (in Japanese, 長崎と天草地方の潜伏キリシタン関連遺産, literally "heritage related to the hidden Christians of the Nagasaki and Amakusa region"). The revised nomination went to UNESCO in January 2017, and ICOMOS inspected the sites again in September 2017.Some components of the earlier list, such as the Hinoe Castle ruins at Minamishimabara, do not appear among the final twelve.
The twelve components tell a single story in four parts.
The beginning of hiding is told by the Remains of . The Shimabara and Amakusa uprising, fought there, shocked the shogunate and led to the ban on Portuguese ships, the closed country, and the absence of missionaries. From then on Christians "hid", practising their faith on their own.Excavations at Hara have found medals received from the missionaries, and small crosses that Christians had made for themselves by melting down bullets.
Then four villages show what the hidden Christians venerated as they prayed. At Kasuga in , they honoured Nakaenoshima, the islet where Christians had been executed early in the ban, as a place of martyrdom where they drew holy water, and they also venerated Mt Yasumandake, a sacred mountain from before the Christian era.At Sakitsu in Amakusa, a fishing village, they took the god Daikokuten or Ebisu to stand for Deus, and the pattern inside an abalone shell for the Virgin Mary.At Shitsu in , they secretly venerated holy pictures of Christian origin and relied on a catechism and a church calendar.At Ono in Sotome, they were outwardly Buddhists and parishioners of the village shrine, but secretly enshrined their own objects of devotion in the shrine.
Five more villages show where they chose to go to keep their communities alive: Kuroshima, where they settled on the site of an old ranch and outwardly prayed before a "" in the Buddhist temple; Nozaki, an island where only a Shinto priest and his parishioners had lived; Kashiragashima, a place avoided as a refuge for the sick; Hisaka, where the Goto domain welcomed settlers; and Egami on Naru island, a remote valley near the sea.Many of these settlers came from Sotome.
And the last component shows how the hiding ended: Oura Cathedral. Built in 1864 after Japan opened its ports, and facing the place where the died in 1597, it was where missionaries and hidden Christians met again after two centuries.Archbishop Takami's statement recalls the day: on Christians of came to the church that Fr of the had built and declared to him the faith handed down from their ancestors.The statue of Mary at the side altar today is the same one that stood there then.
Here the new nomination did something beautiful. It no longer treated the churches as monuments in their own right, but as the end of a long wait. For the villages that returned to the Catholic Church after the ban was lifted, the prefecture's texts say again and again that by building a church, often on high ground or beside the old place of hidden prayer, "their hiding came to an end".The churches became what the hidden Christians had been waiting for. The texts are also honest that not every community took that path: at Kasuga the Christians did not return to the Catholic Church after the ban, and continued their own practice.
The decision, and the Church's reading of it
ICOMOS recommended inscription, and the Committee agreed. According to the Agency for Cultural Affairs, members of the Committee said they strongly supported inscription of a site that tells a unique and outstanding history, and praised the result as an excellent example of cooperation between ICOMOS and the state party. They noted that the efforts of local residents are essential to conserving a property with such strong intangible elements, and asked Japan to keep working on carrying capacity and tourism management for each component.It was Japan's 22nd World Heritage site.
Archbishop Takami's statement is worth reading in full, because it gives the Catholic reading of what UNESCO had recognised. The listing, he wrote, means these sites belong to a unique 470-year history of Christianity in Japan and bear witness to it.He described the faithful of Urakami, Sotome, Hirado, Goto, Amakusa and Imamura in Fukuoka, who were outwardly registered at Buddhist temples, yet kept a secret organisation of a chokata who knew the teaching and the church calendar, a who baptised, and messengers, and so received, guarded and handed on the faith.Since believing in Christ was itself against the law, they were forced to choose between abandoning the faith and losing their lives, and suffered discrimination from those around them. "But the faithful did not rise against the rulers. Without raising their voices they held fast to the basic human right of freedom of religion, put faith in God before the things of this world alone, and went on hoping for what has eternal value. Their way of life is even sublime."
He ended with an invitation that goes beyond the twelve sites. "The churches recognised as World Heritage are only a small part, but they quietly bear witness to the history of the flourishing, the hiding and the revival of the . When you visit not only these churches but other churches too, I hope you will think of the history of the people behind each one, and take it as food for the heart." He asked visitors to keep good manners in the churches and to help support their conservation as cultural properties.
That is the through line of 2018. The campaign began with buildings. UNESCO's advisers asked Japan to look past the buildings to the centuries of hidden faith. The Church, as owner of the churches, could say yes to that with a full heart, because the churches had always been the hidden Christians' answer: what they built first, as soon as they were free.