The smoke of a supper fire
The story told in is this. Bastian (the Japanese form of Sebastian) was a Japanese man born at Nunomaki, south of .The Japan Tourism Agency's sign at Shitsu says he had been the gatekeeper of a Buddhist temple before he became the disciple of a foreign missionary called San Jiwan, San Juan, whom the remembered as Portuguese.In the 1650s, when the persecution was at its fiercest, the two went together to the hidden Christian communities.
When in 1657 more than four hundred hidden Christians of Ōmura were executed in the Kōri crackdown, Bastian is said to have gathered the bodies that drifted ashore on the Uchime coast after being thrown into Ōmura Bay, and buried them at his house.
He moved from hiding place to hiding place in the hills of Sotome.In the end, so the story goes, he was given away by someone from Shitsu and taken at Take-no-yama in Makino; the local historian Matsukawa Ryūji says the smoke from the fire he lit for his supper gave him away.As he was led off along a path called Hirogari near Shitsu, he exchanged a glance with his wife; on the slope above Shitsu harbour, people watched the boat carrying him until it was out of sight.He was held in the Sakuramachi prison in Nagasaki for three years and three months, tortured seventy-eight times, and beheaded.A Nagasaki tourism text says he was executed on the hill of , where the had died.
The calendar
The or ochō, "Bastian's calendar," is a Catholic liturgical calendar for the year 1634, converted to the Japanese lunar calendar, setting out the feasts of Christ's life across the year.It begins on "the 26th day of the second month, the Annunciation of Santa Maria" and ends on the third day of the first month of the following year, with the martyr St Zenobius, whose title mártir the hidden Christians wore down to maruji.Bastian is said to have learned from San Jiwan how to work out the calendar and to have passed it on to the Christians of Sotome.
In Sotome, and , the calendar became the centre of hidden Christian life. The , the keeper of the book, held it and from it announced the feasts and fasts; the faithful kept them together and held baptisms and funerals by it.It was never used on or .Nagasaki Prefecture counts it among the main reasons the Sotome Christians kept their faith for about 250 years.Examples are displayed in Sotome today, at the Sotome Museum of History and Folklore and at a small museum opened by local residents beside church.
The calendar did not come from nowhere. Nagasaki Prefecture notes that had given the believers of a church calendar in 1550, and that after a printing press came to Japan in 1590 calendars in Japanese script also appeared. Bastian's followed those models.
The camellia at Kashiyama
At Kashiyama, about five kilometres southeast of Shitsu, there was a great camellia tree at the foot of Akadake. Bastian, the story goes, traced a cross on its trunk with his fingertip, and the mark stayed on the bark.From then on the Christians treated the tree as holy and Akadake as a sacred place.
Urakami Christians, who could not easily travel there, climbed Mount Iwaya near their village and prayed facing Akadake.(The Urakami parish tells a fuller form of this: three climbs of Iwaya counted as one pilgrimage to Kashiyama, and three pilgrimages to Kashiyama as one to Rome.)
Then a rumour spread that officials were coming to cut the tree down. The Nagasaki Shimbun's account places this in the third Urakami crackdown of 1856.The Christians decided it was better to cut it themselves. They went up at night and felled it in tears, sank the great trunk in the sea, and shared out the rest in small pieces to each household.The pieces were treasured, and at funerals a small sliver, wrapped in cloth, was placed in the coffin as an "omiyage," a gift to take along.A piece is shown in the Sotome Museum of History and Folklore.No one now knows exactly where the tree stood.
The four prophecies
Before he died, Bastian is said to have left four prophecies. The Japan Tourism Agency's text gives them this way:
- "Those I see as my children will, after seven generations, have their souls saved from distress."
- "The Confessors will come in huge black ships and every week you will be able to go to confession."
- "A time will come when you will be able to walk around and sing Christian hymns in a loud voice."
- "If you meet nonbelievers on the road, the nonbelievers will give way to you."
Other versions put the first differently: "I will regard you as my children for seven generations," after which the confessors will come.Nagasaki Prefecture's column says the prophecy spread through Sotome, Urakami and Gotō in the form that "after seven generations a priest who hears confessions will come from across the sea," and that this priest would be sent by the Pope of Rome, would be unmarried, and would honour Santa Maria.
For about 250 years the Christians of Sotome held on to these words.Then came the discovery of 1865 at . When the hidden Christians found that Father was exactly such a priest, they came to Ōura from many places, and some asked him for crosses and medals, openly, in front of the officials who watched the church.The Japan Tourism Agency calls it "curious" that the prophecies came true after seven generations, about 230 years after Bastian's death.
Is it true?
The prophecies have an obvious problem: they fit 1865 almost too well. Matsukawa Ryūji, a researcher in Shimo-Kurosaki who runs the local museum, told the Nagasaki Shimbun in 2018 that he had once suspected they were "too good a story," made up afterwards. What changed his mind was evidence that the legend was already being told locally in the nineteenth century: the , which worked in Sotome, mentions it in its report for 1888.
The thread
Bastian is a name and a set of stories. But the calendar he is said to have handed down told the hidden Christians when to fast and when to feast for two centuries, and the prophecy told them what to look for. When the priests came back, the people of Urakami and Sotome knew how to recognise them.