Story
Why he belongs here
The story of the Christians at is told on our pages as theirs: the men and families of Urakami who were held at the temple of Kōrinji from 1868 to 1873, and the thirty-six or thirty-seven who died there and are honoured today at Otome-tōge.Behind that story stands a man from Tsuwano itself. Fukuba Bisei was a scholar of the national learning, a disciple of the Shinto thinker Ōkuni Takamasa, and one of the officials who framed the religious policy of the new Meiji government.It was his domain that asked to receive the Christians, and it was his school of thought that believed they could be talked out of their faith.The Catholic witnesses who met him remembered a courteous man; the policy he stood for still brought them years of suffering. Both things are part of the record.
A scholar of Tsuwano
He was born on the 17th day of the seventh month of Tenpō 2, in 1831, the son of a samurai of the Tsuwano domain in Iwami.The Tsuwano town culture portal says he was born at village, where his father was serving as district intendant, and that an accident in childhood left him with a physical disability; a friend of his father told him that if he gave himself to learning he could still be of use, and he did.His given name in youth was Bunzaburō; his pen names included Mokuen and Kendō.Dictionaries read his name Bisei; the Tsuwano portal gives Yoshizu and the Yamakawa dictionary notes the reading Yoshishizu.
At nineteen he entered the domain school, the Yōrōkan, to study Chinese learning and military science, but the domain ordered him to specialise in the national learning.The Yōrōkan had been founded in 1786 by the Kamei lords of Tsuwano; in 1849 the eleventh lord, Kamei Koremi, added the national learning and Dutch medicine to its courses, and its later pupils included Nishi Amane and Mori Ōgai.In 1853 Fukuba went to to study under Ōkuni Takamasa, and he also studied with Hirata Kanetane.He returned home in 1860 to teach the national learning at the Yōrōkan.
Loyalist and courtier
In 1862 he went up to Kyoto and joined the loyalist activists who rallied to the emperor.That year, a Heibonsha entry notes, Fukuba and others held rites at Ryōzen in Higashiyama for loyalists who had died violent deaths in the struggle against the shogunate, and in 1863 they built a small shrine in the precincts of Yasaka shrine; it was the first of the shōkonsha, the shrines that later became Yasukuni and the gokoku shrines.After the coup of the 18th day of the eighth month of 1863 he went west with the seven court nobles who fled Kyoto and returned to Tsuwano, where he acted for Kamei Koremi in dealings with Chōshū, Aki and Inaba.
After the Restoration he was called to the new government. In 1868 he became a judge in the office for Shinto affairs, in 1869 a tutor to the young emperor, and in 1870 an assistant vice minister of the Jingikan, where, the Nipponica says, he worked for the policy of making Shinto the national religion.He lectured to the emperor on the Kojiki and guided him in waka.
A teacher's view of Christianity
The historian John Breen notes that Ōkuni Takamasa, Fukuba's master, had earlier shared the hostility to Christianity of the Mito school, but in the 1860s came to believe that Christianity was "a good religion" whose arrival in Japan had been ordained by the Sun Goddess, and which might, under certain conditions, be accommodated in the new Japan."Takamasa and his disciples, men like Fukuba Bisei," Breen writes, "were subsequently responsible for both the counter-Christian policy and the Shinto policy of the early Meiji government."The American historian Thomas Burkman places Fukuba among the more open voices in the Shinto establishment: he regarded foreign religions as variations of the native tradition and "showed great concern for the humane treatment of arrested Christians."
Exile, not execution
In the spring of 1868 the new government had to decide what to do with the Christians of Urakami, who had refused Buddhist funerals and declared their faith after the meeting with Father in 1865.Burkman, working from the diplomatic records, writes that Kido Kōin proposed on 25 April that the Christian leaders be beheaded and their followers removed, but that "under the more moderate urging of Shinto scholar Fukuba Bisei, the Dajokan was persuaded that exile alone should be employed."The decree of 8 June 1868 ordered the removal of about 4,010 Christians to western domains.
The Catholic diocese of Hiroshima, which now cares for Otome-tōge, explains how Tsuwano came to be one of them. Lord Kamei Koremi and his retainer Fukuba Bisei were both at the head of Shinto administration in the new government, and Tsuwano proposed to bring the Christians to a swift change of heart by promoting Shinto; this was why the domain offered to receive them.Twenty-eight of the firmest men of Urakami were sent there in 1868, and about 125 more, nearly all their families, at the end of 1869, although Tsuwano was the only domain under 100,000 koku among those that received exiles.Years later Tsuwano officials told the prisoners that the domain had argued for persuasion rather than killing, and that they had been sent there for that reason; Urakawa Wasaburō, who recorded it, could not say whether it was true.
Dinner with the twelve
The persuasion did not go as planned. Hunger, the cold and a cage three feet square broke many, but by 1869 twelve men still held out.The Catholic historian Urakawa Wasaburō, who gathered the survivors' memories in the 1920s, tells what happened when Fukuba came down from Tokyo while the twelve were still together.He describes him as "the foremost scholar of the national learning in the domain," now a judge of the Jingikan.One day a messenger arrived with twelve pairs of clogs and twelve hats: all twelve were summoned to the lord's mansion. Seishirō was too sick to go, so eleven walked down to the castle town and were shown into the innermost room. Fukuba sat in the place of honour. Trays of sea bream were set before them and the officials served the prisoners themselves.
Fukuba spoke first. "You have been in prison a long time; it must be hard," he said, as Urakawa tells it. If he argued with them, they would think he was forcing them; but he spoke for their own good, and they should not take it amiss. He had come by imperial order to see how the Christians at Tsuwano were kept and what was in their hearts. "Today I will neither persuade you nor argue. Have a cup and cheer yourselves up."
, suspecting a trick, whispered to the others not to drink. No one lifted a cup until Kumakichi of Sakamoto said, "What of it? Drink the sake. A cup of sake cannot change a man's spirit." Fukuba tasted the sake himself to show them, and they drank. Then he probed a little. "If you give up being Christians, is there no salvation in the next life?" Sen'emon answered that there was no way of salvation outside it. Fukuba asked how that could be, when so few in Japan were Christians and so many were not. corrected his elder gently: it was not that God could save no one else, but that faith in the gods and the buddhas could not save. "Hm, is that so," said Fukuba. "We will stop the argument for today. Eat and drink your fill and go home." When they left, Urakawa says, he spoke kindly and sent a bottle of sake and food for the sick Seishirō.
Seishirō, an old man of the Urakami hills who had already been beaten in an earlier arrest, was dying of dysentery. When the others came back he grieved that he alone had not been able to profess the faith before Fukuba, and rejoiced that the eleven had not wavered. He died, Urakawa records, on the 18th day of the second month of Meiji 3, in 1870, aged fifty-five, praying that all eleven would be taken to God.
What came after
Fukuba's courtesy did not end the ordeal. The cage, the frozen pond and the beating of children continued at Tsuwano, and the surviving exiles came home only in 1873, after the ban on Christianity was taken down.Burkman writes that Fukuba "was finally ousted in a power struggle between conservatives and progressives within the Shinto officialdom," and that such struggles only weakened Shinto's dominance.
He went on to a long public career. He became a member of the Genrōin in 1875, served in the education ministry, was made a viscount in 1887 and sat in the House of Peers from 1890.He died on 14 August 1907, aged seventy-seven, leaving many writings on the Kojiki and Japanese scholarship.
At Tsuwano the memory runs the other way. The hill of Kōrinji is now Otome-tōge, the Maiden's Pass, named for the lady who comforted Yasutarō in the cage, and each year Catholics climb it to honour the witnesses whom Tsuwano once hoped to persuade.
