Januarius Hayasaka Kyūnosuke: The First Japanese Bishop

The story begins with a cook. In Sendai, before Hayasaka was born, a man named Seki Rigorō, from Urakami in Nagasaki, cooked for the French missionaries and went every day to buy vegetables at the shop of Hayasaka Kyūgorō, a former retainer of the Sendai domain. The two became friends, and that, a Nagasaki lecture of 2017 relates, was how the Hayasaka family became Catholic.¹

Their second son was born on 17 September 1883 and baptised two days later by Father Maréchal, with the name Januarius.¹²At seven he went to the parish school run by Father Jacquet in Sendai; later he studied at the minor seminary in Tsukiji, Tokyo, and then passed into the Second High School at Sendai, living in the Sendai seminary and walking to class.¹

So the first Japanese bishop was, in a sense, a gift of Urakami. A cook from the village of the hidden Christians, in the years after its people came home from exile, brought the faith to a vegetable shop in the north.

In September 1905, after finishing high school, Hayasaka left for Rome as the first Japanese student on a scholarship of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, to study at the Urban College.¹²That December, Bishop Berlioz of Hakodate took him to meet Pope Pius X.²He studied for five years and eight months and was ordained priest at the Lateran Basilica on 10 June 1911.¹³

Rome gave him friends for life. A few days after his ordination he met two American priests who were in Rome to found a new missionary society: James Anthony Walsh and Thomas Frederick Price, the founders of Maryknoll. The young Japanese priest was about to sail home; the two Americans were about to begin their mission. Maryknoll's magazine later called it a providential meeting of East and West.³Classmates ordained with him on the same day included Americans from Buffalo, and his teacher at the college, Pietro Fumasoni Biondi, later became the first apostolic delegate to Japan.³

A local paper in Buffalo, remembering his student days, described him as small, fluent in English, a speaker of six languages and a sportsman who always played catcher at baseball.³

Hayasaka came home in August 1911 and worked as a priest of the diocese of Hakodate in the northeast.²During the First World War, when many French missionaries were called home, he served at Kesennuma, a town of about eight thousand with a few hundred Catholics. He wrote to Walsh that he prayed for the little flock to grow several times over, and for each one to be a faithful sheep.³His younger brother Kyūbei was ordained in Rome a year later and also worked in the Hakodate diocese.³

In December 1921 Hayasaka became secretary to the apostolic delegate in Japan, Archbishop Mario Giardini. In 1924 he attended the second Tokyo conference of the Japanese Church as a theological adviser, and in 1926 the Ministry of Education appointed him to its commission on the religious system.²³

In 1927 the Holy See decided that the diocese of Nagasaki, the oldest and largest Catholic community in Japan, would be entrusted to Japanese clergy, and it chose Hayasaka as its first Japanese bishop.²The Junshin Sisters, the congregation he founded, place this in the Holy See's policy, set out in Pius XI's encyclical Rerum Ecclesiae (1926), of building up local Churches led by their own clergy.²

Pius XI called him to Rome and consecrated him himself in St Peter's Basilica on 30 October 1927, the feast of Christ the King, in the presence of many cardinals and bishops.¹²³The co-consecrators, Hamada Yoko records, were Archbishop Chambon of Tokyo and Bishop de Guébriant, superior general of the Paris Foreign Missions Society.³In his homily the Pope said: "Now you will return to Japan, sent out again from here in Rome, to spread the kingdom of Christ among the Japanese."²

On the way home he travelled through Europe and America for about five months. In France the Paris Foreign Missions welcomed him as their "spiritual child"; on 5 February 1928 he visited the Carmel of Lisieux, where Saint Thérèse's sisters received him.²³When Walsh wrote to congratulate him in August 1927, the bishop-elect replied in his own English: "On my home way, I may pass through America, so that I am sure to see Fr. Walsh at Maryknoll."³In the United States, a visit that had not been settled when he left Japan on 1 September turned into a month of welcomes: the keys of the city of Buffalo, a reunion with sixteen classmates, Japanese hymns from the schoolgirls of St Adalbert's, and in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, baptisms and confirmations for Japanese immigrant Catholics who had longed to receive the sacraments from a bishop of their own people, in the hard years after the 1924 immigration law.³In Seattle, at a solemn Mass in St James Cathedral on 15 March 1928, the preacher told the story of 17 March 1865, when the hidden Christians of Urakami made themselves known at Ōura; East and West, he said, had met in the unity of the Church.³Asked in America what mattered most now, he answered: the spread of the Christian spirit in his homeland, and "for that we need many priests, many schools, many sisters".²

He landed at Yokohama on 29 March 1928. Waiting for him were the apostolic delegate, Archbishop Rey, Archbishop Chambon of Tokyo, a priest and two laymen representing Nagasaki, priests from Sendai and Ichinoseki, and his brother, Father Hayasaka.³He was not to have travelled alone: Father Fernand Thiry was to have gone with him, but Thiry himself had been named a bishop that July and was consecrated in Nagasaki on 11 December 1927, so Hayasaka went on his own, and Walsh of Maryknoll acted as his secretary by letter and telegram across the Atlantic.³

He was installed as bishop of Nagasaki at Ōura Cathedral on 25 April 1928.¹²That November he founded the diocesan newspaper, the Nagasaki Katorikku Kyōhō.²For the first time, the diocese of Nagasaki had a Japanese bishop of its own.²In nine years he ordained thirteen priests and built many churches, among them Miura-machi, Shimokanzaki, Himosashi, the Hirado Xavier church, Ōtao, Asako, Hamawaki and Magome.¹

In April 1930 a Polish Franciscan arrived in Nagasaki with two brothers and asked permission to publish a Catholic magazine: Maximilian Kolbe. Hayasaka gave it, and within about a month the first Japanese issue of The Knight of the Immaculata appeared, printed as a supplement to the bishop's diocesan paper.⁴⁵Kolbe also taught philosophy at the Ōura seminary for two years.⁶(That the bishop made the teaching a condition of the permission is told in later popular accounts and is Unverified.) Hayasaka also invited the Franciscans to the diocese.¹

The Prefect of Propaganda Fide, Cardinal van Rossum, had urged Hayasaka to found a Japanese congregation of women for the Catholic education of girls and for social work in Nagasaki.²He took it as his own mission. On 8 October 1933 he collapsed with a cerebral haemorrhage.²Eight months later, on 9 June 1934, the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, he founded the Junshin Sisters (純心聖母会) before the statue of Santa Maria of the Discovery at Ōura Cathedral, the statue before which Urakami's hidden Christians had made themselves known in 1865.²His co-founder was Ezumi Yasu. The first clothing was on 17 March 1935, the seventieth anniversary of that discovery, and the first Junshin girls' school opened on 11 April 1935.²

His illness did not lift. He resigned the see in February 1937 and went home to Sendai to recover.²

His episcopal motto was Qui nescit occasum, "which knows no setting", from the Easter Vigil blessing of the paschal candle, the candle that stands for Christ, the sun of justice. His coat of arms set that sun rising over Mount Fuji: the light of Christ, once risen over Japan, would never set.²

On 9 August 1945 the atomic bomb fell on Urakami. In September 1948 Hayasaka, still frail, came back from Sendai to Ōmura to encourage the sisters after the bomb.²An American friend from Maryknoll, Patrick Byrne, who had visited him in Sendai in 1946, supported that rebuilding from behind the scenes, Hamada notes.³

Hayasaka died at the Spellman Hospital in Sendai on 26 October 1959. A memorial Mass was said at Urakami Cathedral on 31 October, and he was buried in Nagasaki, in the clergy cemetery at Akagi.¹²

The faith that a Urakami cook had carried to a Sendai vegetable shop came back to Nagasaki in the person of its first Japanese bishop, and he lies there now among its priests.