"We do not know"
In the language of the of , a was a "crumbling": the moment when a secret community was found out and began to fall apart under arrest and interrogation.The village of , just north of Nagasaki, suffered four of them. The fourth, in 1867, is famous: it ended in the exile of more than three thousand people.This page tells the story of the first three, from 1790 to 1856. They are less well known, but without them the fourth makes no sense, because they show a village that had learned how to keep the faith when the officials came, and what it cost.
1790: the headman's grudge
The first crackdown began not with the faith but with money. The Catholic historian Urakawa Wasaburō, writing from the documents in 1927, tells the story. The village headman, Eizaemon, had set up eighty-eight stone images of Kōbō Daishi on a hill above the Sannō shrine, as a small pilgrimage course. It cost more than he expected, so he called nineteen villagers and told them to contribute twenty-three kan of silver. They refused. He called them "heretics", and since rumours of a forbidden religion were already going round, he and his associates denounced them to the magistrate.The economic historian Shigeto Takeo, writing from the Nagasaki side in 1961, gives the same account: the headman accused them "to satisfy a private grudge".
On the night of the seventeenth day of the seventh month of Kansei 2, in the summer of 1790, the first of the nineteen were seized, and by the twenty-second all nineteen were in prison.Urakawa explains what they did next. The Christians believed that as long as they said "I do not know", they had neither renounced the faith nor committed a crime. However hard they were pressed, all nineteen gave the same answer: "We do not know; we have no knowledge of it."
Their sons wrote to the magistrate. Their fathers, they said, were farmers who paid every tax, parishioners of the Pure Land temple of Shōtokuji, and trod on the fumie every year in front of the officials; if there was any doubt, the magistrate should ask the priest.The headman refused to countersign the petition unless they added a line saying they prayed to "a buddha called Riusu", that is, Deus. Later he was closely questioned about that.
In the end the plot fell apart. Fukahori Yasuzaemon, a village messenger, helped the prisoners' sons draft a petition that went straight to the magistrate, and the headman's scheme came to light. The nineteen were set free. The informers were reprimanded and confined; an official of the intendant's office and the headman Eizaemon lost their posts, and by about the end of 1791 the matter was settled.
It did not stay settled. In 1792 the old headman's party had several of the villagers denounced again, along with Yasuzaemon. One of the accused, a member of the headman's own group, "confessed" that he had once followed the forbidden sect and had given it up, and was let go; the others refused to confess to what they had not done. In 1793 a servant of Yasuzaemon went all the way to Edo and handed a complaint against the headman's party to a senior shogunal official, who passed it back to the .How it all ended is not clear from the documents. Village tradition, as Urakawa recorded it, says the nineteen were each sentenced to a beating as punishment for having fallen under suspicion, and that a fifteen-year-old boy, Magohachi, asked to take the blows in his old father's place.By about 1795 the affair was over.
The villagers were cleared. But Urakawa adds a detail that tells the whole truth of the matter. In the ninth month of 1795, the village asked the Buddhist temple of Enmeiji to pray for it, "to clear ourselves". Some of the letters say simply that they had always honoured the gods and buddhas. Others are worded differently: "Until now we were in error; from now on we will be careful."They had not been heretics in the headman's sense. They had been Catholics.
1842: "We do not know" again
For the next forty years, Urakawa writes, there was hardly a ripple, and the faithful kept the faith in peace.Then in Tenpō 13, 1842, another informer named names, and Rigorō of Hayashi and several others were arrested. Once more they held to "We do not know; we have no knowledge", and were soon released, with only an order to visit the temple more diligently.No papers on this second crackdown survive in the magistrate's records.
1856: the leaders
The third crackdown was different, because this time the informers knew the secrets. Urakawa names one of them, a man called Rikichi, and two Christians from the community itself. They told the officials who was a Christian, which days were feasts, and even that Christian men had hidden names ending in -no and women names ending in -na.On the evening of the eighteenth day of the ninth month of Ansei 3, in the autumn of 1856, constables burst in and seized about fifteen people, among them the village messenger, the physician Kataoka Shunmin and his son, and Sanpachi of Taira.Shigeto notes that this time the headman of Urakami Yamazato, Takaya Kanjūrō, had himself spied on the villagers and reported them.
Village memory kept one comic scene from the headman's own questioning. Told that every Christian man had a secret name ending in -no, one farmer said his was "Yaboka", mosquito; another said "Daruma"; the women gave the names of vegetables. The village still laughed about it when Urakawa wrote.(Tradition.)
The officials were not laughing. Under beatings some prisoners began to talk, and the informers led house searches. Urakawa writes that prisoners were beaten day after day with the demand "Bring out the buddha!", until some named hiding places for images they did not even have.The community sent what holy objects it could to Kashiyama in . A man named Moshige of Kashiyama, who had buried three holy images for a Urakami family at the foot of a hill, would not say where they were. He was imprisoned in Saga for more than a year, escaped, was taken again and died in prison at Fukahori after terrible tortures.
At last one prisoner, broken by torture, named the leader of the whole village: Kichizō of Hayashi, the who kept the church calendar.Kichizō slipped away from home on the eighteenth day of the tenth month, by way of Kurojima to the , where he hid in the mountains. He was found on New Year's Day of 1857 and taken back to Nagasaki with his son.There, the official record says, he was interrogated and entered prison; he died there before his statement was formally signed.Urakawa lists the baptizers () and messengers (kikiyaku) of the community who died with him in prison: Ignatius Denjirō, John Baptist, Peter Ryūhei and others, many under the torments called "the musket" and "the abacus".The Japan Tourism Agency also notes that many of the leaders died in prison under harsh questioning.
What Kichizō said
The magistrate who questioned Kichizō, Okabe Nagatsune, sent a long report to Edo. Urakawa printed part of it from the copy in the Nagasaki Prefectural Library.It is the fullest picture we have of the hidden Church of Urakami from the inside. Kichizō described an image of white porcelain called "", Santa Maria; the prayers "Garasa" and "Abe Maruya", the Hail Mary, and "Ten ni mashimasu", the Our Father; and the Christmas night, "Natariya", when the families kept vigil because, he said, Mary had given birth to the Lord in a cowshed and given him his first bath in a manger.He said that every child of the faithful was brought to him on a Sunday for baptism with water and the sign of the cross.
And he described something that explains the silence of 1790 and 1842. If ever they were found out and questioned, he said, the faithful should hold firm and, however they were tortured, take it as part of the practice of the faith and not confess. Those who in earlier years had been questioned and had not confessed were held in special honour; after death their names were written down and they were remembered with offerings on their anniversaries.The nineteen of 1790 had become, for Urakami, confessors of the faith.
The promise
In the end the magistrate did not call it Christianity at all. The case was closed as an affair of a "foreign sect", the Ishū ikken.The officials asked Edo for permission to confiscate the survivors' property and drive them out, but nothing came of it, and by about the end of 1860 the remaining prisoners were home.In the seventh month of 1857 all the heads of household in Urakami were summoned to the magistrate's West Office and asked why they had followed the forbidden religion. They said it had been handed down from their ancestors, that they had not known it was a forbidden sect, and that they would stop. In the twelfth month the women and the sick were summoned to the headman's house and told the same, and they too promised, and sealed it with their thumbprints.
They did not stop. Shigeto, no apologist, says plainly that after three crackdowns the farmers of Urakami still did not give up the faith. One baptizer had survived 1856, and he went on baptising every child born, with the correct form of words; the families prayed together round the dying and kept Sundays and feasts.Urakawa adds a merciful ending: the two informers from inside the community later repented, and one of them became a fervent Christian.
Nine years after the promise, the first Urakami families walked into the new church at and asked the priest where the statue of Santa Maria was.