The headman's house
For two centuries the house of the , the headmen of , stood on the best ground in the village: central, high and dry, with a fine view.It was the place the Christians of Urakami could not forget. Here the were brought when they were arrested and examined for their religion.Here, every New Year, the villagers were called in to tread on the holy images, the fumie, praying under their breath the no , the prayer of contrition, as their feet came down.And here in 1869, at the time of the great exile, the villagers were gathered and told, one by one, where they were to be sent.
The historian Thomas Burkman, writing on the arrests of July 1867, notes that the sixty-three Christians taken that night were brought first to the ōshōya, the district headman, and then to the office of the magistrate.Burkman does not name the house; that it was the Takaya house is likely but not stated.
Bought back
When the exiles came home in 1873 they had nowhere to pray but a small temporary chapel at Doi, built in 1879, which held only about two hundred people.Then, unexpectedly, the headman's estate came up for sale. The Christians worked hard to get it, and on 4 June 1880, the feast of the Sacred Heart, the contract was signed. The price was only 1,600 yen.
They chose their dates with care. On 7 July, the feast of the 205 martyrs of Japan, they began to repair the house and turn it into a chapel; and on 15 August, the Assumption, the first Mass was said there.The room where their parents had been made to tread on images of Christ and Mary became a church. It served as the temporary church until the great cathedral was finished, which the parish dates to 1915 (other sources give 17 March 1914: Disputed), was then used for catechism classes, and burned in 1945.
The object
When the first was finished, a persimmon tree stood at the front on the right, with a big natural stone beside it. The parish history explains why they mattered. The spot was the entrance of the old house of the Takaya headmen, which the Catholics of Urakami had bought in 1880. "Our ancestors were tied to this tree and tormented at their examinations for religion. The stone to its right was the headman's water basin, and it watched the torment in silence, it is said."(Tradition: the parish gives it as handed-down memory.)
A photograph on the parish's page shows the old headman's house, then used as a chapel, with the persimmon tree at its right edge; another shows Father Fraineau and parishioners beside the tree.
Burned and remade
The of 9 August 1945 destroyed the cathedral, and the persimmon tree beside it burned.A year later, in August 1946, the young men of the parish wanted to restart the round of Communion visits, district by district. They dug the root of the persimmon tree out of the ashes and made it into a cross, the "Cross of the Communion Round" (巡回聖体拝領の十字架). It travelled from district to district each week to call everyone to Communion. The parish says it is still used every Sunday, handed on from district to district as the baton of the liturgy rota.
The wood to which, by tradition, the persecuted were bound now leads the parish to the altar. On the very ground where Urakami was once made to deny Christ each New Year, the root of the tree that watched it is carried from house to house every week to call the people to receive him.