Story
In the summer of 1874, a year after the Christians of came home from exile, a dysentery epidemic broke out in the villages around . Among the people who went into the sick houses to nurse the dying was a young woman of Urakami called Iwanaga Maki. She was about twenty-six. Before she died in 1920 she had raised, with her companions, 294 orphaned children, and the community she founded still lives today as a religious congregation of the Archdiocese of Nagasaki.
Home from exile
Iwanaga Maki was born in 1848 or 1849 (Disputed).She was one of the 3,394 Christians of Urakami sent into exile in 1870, after the Meiji government decided to break the community that had revealed itself at in 1865.The Urakami people called the exile their "journey" ().Maki's was spent in the territory of Okayama; the congregation she founded names the place as Tsurushima, an island in the Seto Inland Sea.
In 1873 the government removed the that had banned Christianity, and on March 14 ordered the exiles home; 1,938 were still in exile at that order, and they were home by July; the total who returned is Disputed.Maki was about twenty-five.The village they came back to was poor; the government had put up barracks for some of the returnees.
The summer of 1874
In July 1874 dysentery broke out at Magome on Iojima, the island at the mouth of Nagasaki harbor. It spread to Daimyoji and Kaminoshima, then jumped to the coast, to Nagata and , and at last reached Urakami. About a hundred Christians died. There was almost no public hygiene and hardly a doctor to be had. At Magome, people at first fled to the hills, leaving the sick in their houses. When they heard that the missionaries were coming in person to visit the sick and give out medicine, they were ashamed and came home.
Fr Joseph-Marie crossed to the island with Fr Poirier and Fr de Rotz. (1840 to 1914) was one of the priests whose practical skills, from building to medicine, marked the Church of Urakami and Sotome in these years.They gave instructions on cleanliness, taught the people how to nurse, and set up a system for distributing medicine. Some sixty patients were close to death, and the faithful, following the priests' direction, nursed them with all their hearts.The Catholic historian Urakawa Wasaburō singles out a woman catechist of Magome named O-En, whose courage, he wrote, made one wonder whether even the Sisters of Charity could have shown more. She caught the disease herself. When a visiting priest, Fr Midon, came to comfort her mother, the mother answered: "This girl was given to God long ago. If she falls while nursing the sick for God, I shall not grudge it." O-En died two or three days later. Another young woman stepped forward to take her place, and when she too was infected, another came after her.
Urakawa printed the Church's own tally for the four months from June to September. At Magome the priests and their helpers nursed 136 patients, of whom 40 died; at Kurosaki 162, with 12 deaths; at Daimyoji 83, with 22 deaths; on Kagenoo 14, with 6 deaths; and in Urakami 210 patients, of whom 8 died.The epidemic was over by November. But in Urakami the relief work did not stop. It went on with Fr de Rotz in charge.
It was here that Iwanaga Maki enters the record. Urakawa names the unmarried young women who helped Fr de Rotz give out medicine and nurse the sick: "Iwanaga Maki, her companion Kiku, Moriyama Matsu and others". They gathered together, he wrote, and began to live a kind of convent life, and "before anyone knew it" it had grown into the organization of his own day.That, he said, was the origin of the "women's houses" (onna-beya), which "made the flowers of Catholic charity bloom" in the Cross Society at Tsuji in Motohara, in the care of orphans, and in women's catechesis.
To have a base for the relief work, Fr de Rotz borrowed a hut from his friend , himself a returned exile, and later turned it into an orphanage (Unverified).
The typhoon of August 1874
Smallpox broke out on Kagenoo island in August.On August 20, as the dysentery began to ease, a typhoon struck Nagasaki that old people, Urakawa says, still remembered decades later. Most houses at Magome fell; at Daimyoji eighty-five houses out of a hundred went down; in Urakami more than half were damaged, and the first to collapse were the government barracks of the year before. The rice was flattened or washed away and the harvest was lost.Bishop came to Nagasaki, saw the misery of the faithful with his own eyes, and appealed to Christians in Europe for help.
Epidemic and storm left children with no one. Maki and her companions, with Fr de Rotz's spiritual and financial support, began to take in orphaned and abandoned children.The women farmed to support themselves and the children, and raised and taught them.The Handbook adds that the community later took up silk cultivation and reeling, and did many works of charity in Urakami and elsewhere.Over her lifetime Maki and her sisters raised and adopted 294 orphans.
From women's house to congregation
The congregation's own chronology gives the steps. In 1874, during the relief work, the Urakami orphanage was founded and Fr de Rotz laid the foundation of the Cross Society. In 1877 the Cross Society was formally established as a quasi-religious community.In 1879 Fr de Rotz founded a sister community, the Society of St Joseph, at Shitsu in Sotome, with Oishi Shige as superior; after that, similar communities for parish service and charity spread across the diocese.The Handbook counts thirteen such communities in Nagasaki Prefecture alone in the Meiji period.
In 1956 Archbishop Aijirō united the scattered communities, twenty-six of them, into a single secular institute, the Seihi Shimaikai, with its headquarters at Ōura.In 1975, under Archbishop (later Cardinal) Asajirō Satowaki and with the approval of the Holy See, it became a full religious congregation and took the name it bears today, the Sisters of Our Lady of the Annunciation.Its stated purpose is to live first of all with God, to give itself wholly to the mission of Christ and his Church, and to serve the diocese and parishes especially through the religious education of children and works of welfare.One of its convents, the Jūji Shūdōin ("Convent of the Cross"), is at Tsuji-machi in Nagasaki.
Urakawa calls the first women simply "unmarried young women", and the Handbook "a community of Japanese virgins".The congregation describes the 1877 community as a "quasi-religious" society.It took a century, from Maki's house of 1874 to the papal approval of 1975, for her daughters in religion to become a congregation in the full canonical sense.Maki herself did not live to see even the first step of that, the union of 1956. She died in 1920.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Solid: the 1874 epidemic was dysentery (赤痢), with smallpox alongside. Urakawa 1928, pp. 764 to 767 (NDL frames 405 to 406; 赤痢 and 岩永マキ checked on the page image, October 20, 2026), the congregation's own chronology, and three Japan Tourism Agency texts all say dysentery.Only the Handbook (Ballhatchet, p. 39) says "cholera", citing Tashiro 1989.
- Disputed: birth year, 1848 (JTA)or 1849 (Handbook, Commons).
- Solid: founding year of the community, 1874 (Handbook: "In 1874 a community of Japanese virgins was formed")vs 1877 (congregation, JTA: formal establishment); the congregation dates the orphanage and the "foundation" of the Cross Society to 1874.
- Unverified: that Tsurushima lay in Okayama territory. Place of exile: "Okayama" (JTA)and "Tsurushima (Seto Inland Sea)" (congregation).
- Solid: Urakawa's table (p. 765), checked on the page image, October 20, 2026: Magome 136/40, Kurosaki 162/12, Nagata 11/2, Makino, Shitsu and Ono 72/3, Kaminoshima 27/unknown, Daimyoji 83/22, Kagenoo 14/6, Oyama 2/1, Urakami 210/8. Urakawa's text also says about a hundred Christians died in all; the table's known deaths total 94 plus unknowns. Consistent.
- Unverified: Takagi Sen'emon's hut, from a single source.
- Unverified: whether the present Jūji Shūdōin stands on the site of the first Cross Society house at Tsuji in Motohara.