The Raid on the Four Secret Chapels of Urakami, 15 July 1867

The Catholic historian Urakawa Wasaburō, who wrote the history of these years from the missionaries' letters and the villagers' memories, describes a village on fire with the faith. Christians who had learned the catechism went out as catechists to the Gotō Islands, Sotome and Hirado. One young father from Nakano, asked by the priest who would plough his fields and care for his wife and little daughter if he went away to teach, answered: "God will."⁴In the spring of 1867, Father Laucaigne gave the sacraments to 107 people at Nakano in a fortnight; with Father Cousin he baptized thirty-one at the Saint Joseph chapel and gave fifty Communion and Confirmation; at the Holy Mary chapel at Hira two hundred and fifty asked for the sacraments.⁴To reach the chapels, the Urakami church history says, Laucaigne left Ōura late at night when everyone was asleep, in a Japanese kimono, a wig with a topknot, straw sandals and a towel over his head, while one or two young men walked with him carrying a lantern and the vessels for Mass on their backs. One of them was Tokusaburō, son of the Nakano elder Kyūgorō.²

The officials knew. Urakawa writes that they had long been aware that the missionaries were in touch with the villagers and only hoped it would not become public.⁴Then, in the spring of 1867, Urakami families began burying their dead without the Buddhist priest of Shōtokuji. The intendant Takagi Sakuemon reported to the magistrate's office that, from the first month of that year, the villagers "no longer hid anything" and went to the foreigners' church together on Sundays; when Sanpachi's mother died on the second day of the third month, the family buried her themselves, and when they were questioned they said that all of them had been taught by the French priests and repented before death, so that they needed no Buddhist rites.⁵

The magistrate's office sent spies into Urakami. The Urakami church history quotes their report, still kept in the Nagasaki Prefectural Library: the "temples" had thatched roofs and looked like ordinary houses, but there were foreign images inside, and the faithful gathered every day to recite prayers.²

On Saturday 13 July 1867, Father Laucaigne went secretly to the Holy Mary chapel at Hira, meaning to stay for two weeks. Father Poirier was to join him on Monday evening, and Father Cousin was to go to the Santa Clara chapel. Laucaigne wrote that Saturday night and Sunday passed very quietly; despite heavy rain, many Christians came for the sacraments.²⁴Urakawa records that the magistrate's deputy, Tokunaga Iwami no kami, unwilling to wait for the magistrate's return from Edo, sent a force of about one hundred and seventy men under three officials of the judicial office, choosing a night of wind and rain.⁴

At about three on Monday morning, 15 July 1867, the owner of the house, Ichinosuke, burst into Laucaigne's little room: "They have come to arrest us! Run!" Laucaigne threw a Japanese coat over his cassock and went out by the back door with the catechist Tatsuemon and two young men as the constables came in at the front.²They climbed the hill and hid all day in the forest. There Ichinosuke, who was not yet baptized and was in more danger than anyone for having sheltered a priest, asked to be baptized, and Laucaigne baptized him.²

At the Saint Francis Xavier chapel in Nakano, three young men were sleeping: Matsuda Kisuke, Sanada Zennosuke and Moriyama Jinzaburō. Jinzaburō, who left a written account, says that about two in the morning they saw some thirty lanterns coming and began to hide the holy things. Zennosuke escaped through a window. Kisuke was tied.²⁴Jinzaburō, Urakawa writes, calmly went on taking down the holy pictures and stacked them in the confessional. Then he knelt in front of the constables, put his hands behind his back and said: "Please tie me."⁴The constables had heard that Christians could work magic, and his calm frightened them; in Jinzaburō's own words, they would not come near him but threw the rope from a distance, and three of them tied him so tightly that he fainted on the way and had to be revived with water.²He was twenty-one.⁴

At the Saint Joseph chapel at Tsuji, the chapel was in the house of Takagi Sen'emon. In his own memorandum he wrote that at about three in the morning there was a violent knocking, and when he woke the house was already full of constables. They tied him up. He asked what he had done; the answer was "Insolent fellow, you will find out later", and a blow. On the way they demanded to know where the house of Mataichi of Hira was. "I did not tell them, so that they would not take Mataichi, and I did not let my son tell them either." A constable drew his sword, said "I'll cut you down", and struck him on the neck with the back of the blade.²⁴

Below the Holy Mary chapel, the women and girls were sleeping in the house of Iwanaga Ichizō. When the knocking came, his daughter Maki opened the door thinking Father Poirier had arrived. The constables went on up to the chapel. When they came back they arrested Ichizō; Maki argued that he had only gone to look, and his clothes were not even wet, and they were about to untie him when another constable said: "Open his shirt; he will be wearing a charm." Round his neck was the scapular of Our Lady, and that was proof enough.²⁴Maki's younger sister Fui threw her rosary behind a chest, and a constable started to climb onto the mats in his muddy sandals to search for it. A young woman named Kachi, who had come from Inario to study the catechism, seized a carrying pole and told them that only robbers broke into people's houses at night; the constables gave up the search.⁴In the chapel above, Urakawa writes, the constables smashed the altar stone, trod on the holy pictures, and carried off the chalice and the vestments.⁴Mataichi's son Tomokichi, a catechist who could hardly walk, was arrested and beaten half to death.²⁴

At Nakano, Urakawa tells, the constables beat the village elder Kyūgorō, still only a catechumen, as he stood naked and bound, and he did not make a sound. The constables looked at one another and said: "This one is a real Christian."⁴

The intendant Takagi Sakuemon's own report to the magistrate's office gives the official count. On the night of the thirteenth day of the sixth month, the officials and a large force "arrested sixty-eight people, men and women, and took the images set up in four places in the village built like chapels".⁵The prisoners were tied two to a rope and rushed down to the prison at Sakuramachi in Nagasaki.²⁴

What happened next must be told honestly. When the people of Urakami saw their catechist beaten and the vestments carried off as rain hats, Urakawa writes, young men came running with staves and bamboo spears, drove the remaining constables away and surrounded the headman's house until the chalices and vestments were given back. Then, not content, they beat the young man who had guided the constables and some of the constables' men. Only the intendant, Takagi, riding out that evening to calm both sides, prevented a fight.⁴Urakawa, a priest, does not excuse it: it went against the gentleness and charity that Christianity teaches, Father Poirier rebuked the villagers severely, and the Meiji government later used the episode to brand the Christians as rioters.⁴

The raid of 15 July opened the last persecution of Urakami, the Yonban kuzure. Within two years more than three thousand villagers were sent into exile across western Japan.¹The four chapels are gone. Today stone markers and signboards stand at their sites, at Tsuji, Hashiguchi and Ōhashi in Nagasaki.³⁷The people taken that night, Jinzaburō and Sen'emon among them, faced years of prison and exile before the survivors came home in 1873, after the notice boards against Christianity were taken down.¹