Every month, on set days, a French priest walked the lanes of Urakami with a satchel over his shoulder. Children ran ahead of him shouting that the priest was coming. Families came out with 5 or 10 sen, and he wrote each gift in a little book.
His name was Pierre-Théodore , of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, the son of a family of stonemasons and carpenters. He had arrived in Nagasaki in 1873, the year the exiles came home, and in 1888 he became their parish priest. He was collecting for a cathedral. When the bishop saw his plans and asked where the money would come from, Fraineau, by the parish's account, answered calmly: "It will come down from heaven." a parish anecdote.
It came down in copper coins from farmers who, fifteen years earlier, had come home from exile to find their houses gone. A community building in the open for the first time, and a state that let it build but never stopped watching.
Freedom, sort of
On 24 February 1873 the government took down the notice boards that had banned Christianity since 1614. It did not proclaim religious freedom; it simply stopped saying the old ban out loud. In Nagasaki, Bishop Bernard Petitjean, the priest of the discovery, had spent the exile years writing to Rome. On 29 May 1873 Pope Pius IX wrote to him in the brief Dum asperrimam to share his joy at the end of the persecution. "From this moment," the archive of the Paris Foreign Missions Society says, "the Japanese government showed itself disposed to tolerance," and Petitjean began to organise his vicariate. The returned exiles of Urakami came home to burned fields and empty house lots, and 736 had no house at all.
Then disease came. In July 1874 dysentery broke out on Iōjima and spread to Urakami, followed by smallpox. Father Marc nursed the sick, helped by young returnees such as Iwanaga Maki; the community they formed raised orphans and became the Urakami .
The headman's house
The returnees wanted a church of their own. In 1880 the estate of the , the village headmen, came up for sale. It was the house where their families had been made to tread on the fumi-e every New Year, and where the exile had been announced. On 4 June 1880 the Urakami Catholics bought it for 1,600 yen and made it a temporary church. They held their first Mass there on 15 August, the feast of the Assumption.
By the late 1880s more than 5,000 believers were spilling out of its doors at Sunday Mass.
Churches in the villages
The end of the ban changed the landscape of western Kyushu. The communities that rejoined the Church began building in the very hamlets where they had hidden, simple at first and then grander, as priest-builders such as de Rotz in Sotome and Urakami and Father Pelu in the Gotō Islands trained Japanese craftsmen. Ōura itself was rebuilt in brick in 1879 and blessed by Petitjean, by then a bishop, on 22 May 1879.
One of the craftsmen trained in this way was , a master carpenter from the upper Gotō Islands. Nagasaki Prefecture's heritage site says he learned church building from Father de Rotz and Father Pelu, and that he was a Buddhist who came to understand the Christian spirit through his friendship with the priests. He went on to design and build more than thirty churches. In 1908 he built the brick church of Nokubi on Nozaki Island, laid in English bond under a roof of Japanese tiles, with a ribbed vault inside; the prefecture describes it as the work of Japanese carpenters, taught directly by European missionaries, joining Western and Japanese techniques. At Ōso on Nakadōri Island, finished in 1916, he banded the brick walls with courses of dark over-fired brick and crowned the bell tower with an octagonal dome. For the altar at Egami he drew ears of wheat and a fruiting vine, for the bread and the wine, with roses for Mary; the drawing, found in 2005, is dated 21 June 1917.
About thirty of his drawings survive. They were found when his old house at Maruo was demolished, conserved in 2016, and are now shown at the Geihinkan Museum in Arikawa.
The most remarkable of his churches stands on , a small island off the Gotō coast. Work began in 1910, and the families of a small hamlet put all their strength into it for ten years until it was finished in 1919. It is built of cut local sandstone, with an octagonal dome on its bell tower, and Nagasaki Prefecture calls it outstanding among the island churches. It was designated an Important Cultural Property on 14 November 2001.
De Rotz's own story shows what these priests did beyond building. A member of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, he landed in Nagasaki in 1868 and printed catechisms by lithograph at Ōura. From 1879 he was parish priest of Sotome, on the coast north of Nagasaki, among the descendants of the hidden Christians. He designed Shitsu Church himself and built it in 1882. In 1883 he added a workshop to help the village women support themselves, with a macaroni factory and a sardine-net works; he imported tools and taught people to use them with drawings. In 1893 he built a small chapel at Ōno for the 26 Christian households there, of local stone set in a mortar of red earth and lime, a technique now called the de Rotz wall. The villages of Shitsu and Ōno are now one of the twelve components of the UNESCO property "Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region".
Across the water the pattern repeated. Kuroshima, an island off Sasebo, had been settled in the 18th century partly by hidden Christians from Sotome. After 1873 the whole community rejoined the Church. In 1902 they finished one of the largest brick churches in Japan, designed by Father Joseph Marmand. On Fukue, in the Gotō Islands, Marmand had built a small wooden church at Dozaki in 1880. His successor, Father Pelu, planned a brick one, which the builder Nohara Yokichi completed in 1908.
The light inside those churches changed too. Stained glass made in Japan begins with Unosawa Tatsuo, who trained in Berlin and made his first Japanese work, for the Tokyo Prefectural Office, in 1894. At Egami on Naru Island, finished in 1918, there is no true stained glass at all: believers painted cherry blossoms by hand on clear window glass.
A farmers' cathedral
Fraineau's cathedral was begun in 1895, to his own design: a Romanesque church of stone and brick. Inflation after two wars slowed it. Fraineau gave his own money, lived in great poverty, and died of overwork on 24 January 1911, after 38 years in Japan, with the walls half built. When stone and brick were landed at the pier, believers competed to carry them up Takaya hill.
His successor, the Belgian Father Raguet, simplified the plan to finish faster. The church was dedicated to the Immaculate Conception. Nagasaki City and the hypocenter park plaque give 1914 for the dedication; the parish history gives 18 March 1915, the day after the 50th anniversary of the Discovery. The twin bell towers were finished in 1925, thirty years after the first stone, with bells from France.
People called it the largest church in the East. Note: this was a popular boast, not a measured claim. What mattered more was where it stood: on the ground of the headman's house, where the fumi-e had been trodden.
A Japanese bishop
The Church in Japan was becoming Japanese. In 1927 the Diocese of Nagasaki was placed under Japanese leadership, and on 30 October that year Pope Pius XI consecrated in Rome as the first Japanese bishop.
New Catholics came from outside the old communities, too. Nagai Takashi, born in Shimane in 1908, graduated from Nagasaki Medical College in 1932; an ear infection ended his plan to practise internal medicine, and he turned to radiology. In June 1934 he was baptised with the name Paul, and in August he married Moriyama Midori, from an Urakami Christian family. In July 1937 he went to China as an army doctor and came home in 1940 to head his department. In June 1945 he learned he had leukaemia and was given three years to live. He will matter in the next chapter.
Sixty students at Yasukuni
But the conditions written into Article 28 were tightening. The government promoted shrine Shinto as a patriotic duty and called it civic rather than religious. On 5 May 1932 Colonel Kitahara Hitomi, the army officer assigned to , the Jesuit university in Tokyo, marched about sixty preparatory students to , the shrine to Japan's war dead. When the command came to salute the war dead, two students, perhaps three, did not present arms.
The army made it a test. In June the Ministry of Education was told that the army was recalling its officer, because "the spirit of Sophia University did not fall in line with the principles of Japanese education." Archbishop Chambon of Tokyo asked the ministry what the bow meant. On 30 September the vice minister replied that it had "no other purpose than that of manifesting the sentiments of patriotism and loyalty."
Under watch
Elsewhere the pressure was harsher. On Amami Ōshima a local campaign in the 1930s closed the Catholic girls' school, drove out the Church's workers and forced most believers to renounce their faith. The Religious Organizations Law of 1939 placed every religion under state control. It required each religious body to submit its doctrines to the Ministry of Education for approval, so that religion could be mobilised for the national cause.
The ministry at first demanded that Catholics cut their tie with the Pope, then backed down after protests. Western bishops were replaced by Japanese ones, Western heads of Catholic schools gave way to Japanese, and in May 1941 the Church was reorganised as a single body, the Nippon Tenshu Kōkyō Kyōdan, under Archbishop Doi Tatsuo of Tokyo. The historian Hamish Ion judges that Doi, like some Protestant leaders, became a mouthpiece for wartime propaganda, while groups that would not conform, above all the Holiness churches, saw pastors jailed.
The farmers' cathedral was still standing on Takaya hill. On the morning of 9 August 1945, priests sat in its confessionals hearing confessions before the feast of the Assumption. That is where Chapter V begins.
