One man holding the sacrament for everyone
In the hidden Christian villages of , the most precious thing the community possessed was not an object. It was baptism. With no priests in Japan for more than two centuries, the faithful kept the sacrament alive through lay baptizers, the , who held a leading place among the and whose task was to baptise.As long as there was one , a child born in Urakami could still become a Christian.
By the spring of 1865 Urakami had only one. In 1856 the magistrate's officers had raided the villages in the crackdown remembered as the Third Urakami , which ran until 1860. When it was over, Iwanaga Mataichi was the only mizukata left alive.The Urakami parish history gives the cost: the Kichizō, head of the hidden church, had died in prison, and three of the four mizukata were lost. The underground church had all but collapsed, and it was Mataichi who held it up.
A play written for the 150th anniversary of the discovery adds that his eyes grew weak during his years in prison, and that he went on baptising the newborn babies of Urakami all the same.Tradition: a dramatist's telling, not a record. The parish of , which keeps his memory, calls him "a hero of the faith who stood in the leading place in the church of Urakami".He came from Hira, one of the Urakami hamlets, from a family of wealthy farmers known by the house name "Nawakomoya".
His name entered the written history of the Church within days of the . About ten days after the meeting at Oura on 17 March 1865, Fr reported to his superior, Fr Girard: "One of those who visited told me that among them baptism is still preserved." Through that report the Church in Europe learned of the mizukata Iwanaga Mataichi.The sacrament that one man had carried through the raids was now in touch with the priests again.
Petitjean's own words survive in French. Marnas prints his account of Easter Tuesday, 18 April 1865, when the two priests were led through the brush to a clump of pines where "Domingo, le baptiseur" waited with a few relatives. Domingo told them that only fear of compromising "our holy cause" had kept him from coming often to the church. He gave them his baptismal formula, "Kono hitowo paoti'zo in nomne Patero, Hilio, et S'ra Spiritou Sancto" (as printed), and promised to use from then on the form they wrote out for him. "Domingo nous assure être le seul survivant des baptiseurs de la vallée": Domingo assures us that he is the only surviving baptizer of the valley.Marnas gives only his Christian name; the Tsuwano register calls Mataichi "Dominic", which is the basis for identifying the two.
The chapel behind his house
After 1865 the Christians of Urakami built , thatched farmhouses with an altar at the back, where the missionaries came by night to teach, baptise and say Mass. One of them, the Santa Maria chapel, stood behind Mataichi's house at Hira.The magistrate's spies drew its plan.
Before dawn on 15 July 1867 the magistrate's men broke into the chapels. Father , who was hidden at the Santa Maria chapel, escaped into the hills.Mataichi's son Tomokichi, who had taken his father's place as a catechist, was seized and beaten half to death and thrown into a ditch by the road, until the Christians drove the officers off and carried him away.
At the Saint Joseph chapel at Tsuji the officers arrested . Leading him away, they stopped and demanded: "Where is the house of Mataichi of Hira?" In his own memorandum Sen'emon wrote that he would not tell them, so that Mataichi should not be taken, and would not let his son tell either, even when they drew a sword and said they would cut him down.The village protected its baptizer.
Exile
The cost came soon. When the Meiji government exiled the Christians of Urakami, Mataichi was in the first exile. There he was thrown into a freezing pond and tortured with water.His family followed him: his wife, two sons and three daughters, and his eldest son's daughters, were sent to Tsuwano and joined him; only the eldest son was sent elsewhere, to Hagi.
The register of the exiles, the 異宗門徒人員帳, as transcribed by the Tsuwano parish, gives the dates in a few lines. Dominic Iwanaga Mataichi, head of household, from Hira, died on the 16th day of the 10th month of Meiji 3 (9 November 1870), aged 47. Catharina Iwanaga Suki, his wife, died less than a month later, on the 10th day of the intercalary 10th month (2 December 1870), aged 45; the parish says she "followed her husband in martyrdom". Their daughter Catharina Mori, called Mori-chan, died on 4 September 1871, aged six.
That might have been the end. But the Catholic historian Urakawa Wasaburo, writing in 1928, looked at what happened to the families of the strongest witnesses. God, he wrote, often rewards the courage of believers in their descendants; and among the brave whose children or grandchildren were called to be priests, religious sisters or catechists, he names Iwanaga Mataichi beside Takagi Sen'emon, Kataoka Ichiemon and Moriyama Jinzaburo.The Tsuwano parish adds the plain fact: Mataichi's third son, Sanjiro (Shinpei), later became a priest.
So the line ran on. In 1856 the whole sacramental life of Urakami rested on one surviving layman. Fifteen years later that layman lay in an exile's grave at Tsuwano, and his son would one day stand at the altar as a priest of the Church his father had kept alive in secret.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Eyesight. Only in the 2015 play. Tradition.