Kataoka Sada: "We Could Say Our Prayers Out Loud"

Most of what we know about Sada comes from her own words. The Urakami Cathedral parish history quotes at length from a manuscript account of her experiences, and introduces her simply: Sada, aged thirty, wife of Otogorō (thirty-four) of Ipponki in Motohara-gō, sent with her four daughters to Kishū Wakayama.¹The parish page captions her photograph "Kataoka Sada".¹

Her people had already waited a long time. In 1868 the new Meiji government, committed to a Shinto state, decided to punish the Christians of Urakami: the leaders were to be dealt with severely in Nagasaki, and the remaining three thousand and more were to be sent away to the larger domains west of Owari.¹The first 114 leaders went in 1868; the summons for the rest of the heads of household came at the end of the eleventh month of Meiji 2, the turn of the year 1870 by the Western calendar.¹

Sada remembered it exactly. The men left home on the fourth day of the twelfth month. On the fifth the women and children were summoned. On the morning of the sixth, with deep snow on the ground, she took two of her daughters by the hand, carried one on her back, and went to gather in the rice fields at Azenashi, near the present Ōgimachi. From there they were taken to the fields below the village headman's house at Yamazato, and then to Nishi-yashiki, the government office. "On the way," she said, "we prayed the rosary at the top of our voices."¹

That is the thread to hold on to. Through everything that followed, the question was whether these women could go on praying, and how loudly.

They spent the night of the sixth at Nishi-yashiki. On the seventh, after an examination, the people were sent off in every direction. "Those of us bound for Kishū boarded a ship in the evening," Sada said, "and on the fourteenth we were taken up to a temple in Wakayama."¹The Catholic historian Urakawa Wasaburō, who gathered the exiles' recollections into his history of the revival, adds what the sea passage was like. The women sailed in a steamer and in a sailing ship towed behind it; somewhere past Shimonoseki the bottom of the sailing ship gave way, and they had to be moved to another vessel at Kaminoseki before they landed at Wakaura and were lodged in the Chōkakuji temple in Katahara-machi.³At first, he writes, the only hardship was that food was short.³

For forty days a guard watched them. Then they were moved to a temple at a place Sada calls Iwasaki, "and there for the first time we saw the faces of our men."¹It lasted about twenty days. Urakawa explains what came next: from around the twentieth of the first month, the exiles were led out of the temple twenty or thirty at a time, often secretly at night, and everyone over fifteen was lodged alone with a temple or a headman somewhere in the domain, some near Arida, some as far off as Kuchikumano and Okukumano.³Sada saw it from inside: "Again we were separated. Those who had only small children were kept with those children, and the others did not even know where anyone was."¹The purpose, Urakawa says, was to leave each Christian alone and without support, so that officials and Buddhist and Shinto clergy could work on them one by one.⁴

In the sixth month of Meiji 3, in the summer of 1870, those who could work were sent to heavy labour on the salt-pan works at Hikata, about two ri from Wakayama.⁴The children, the old and the sick were put into a horse stable. Sada was one of them.

"When they put us in, they searched us," she remembered, "and took away our rosaries and our flags of Mary."¹Urakawa describes the building: a long stable thirty-three ken in length, logs laid on a damp earth floor with boards and a single straw mat on top, high latticed windows that let in no sun, and the room divided so that men and women could not talk.⁴There were no mosquito nets, no lamps and no bedding.⁴The ration was two gō five shaku a day of rotten imported rice; the men hired to cook it ate their fill first and brought the rest as a thin gruel.⁴⁵

Sada spoke of the stable plainly. She was there from the sixth month until the first month of the next year. "Those days were sad. A fever spread and about nine people died. There was not a drop of water, and no medicine. At night there was no light, so when someone was dying we could not tell in the darkness whether they still had breath or had already died. We touched them with our fingertips, and listened for the sound of their breathing, and so we did the last duties for them. In the pitch dark we said the orasho for the dead."¹

When someone died, the women laid over them the white "veil of the soul", the veil used at baptism, which the Christians had worn as they left home for the journey. Lice covered it so quickly that the white veil looked black. The bodies were not taken away until night, packed into barrels so small that half the body stuck out, and the only thing left to cover them with was the soiled mat the dead person had lain on.¹Urakawa records that eighty-seven people died in the stable between the sixth month of Meiji 3 and the sixteenth day of the first month of Meiji 4.⁵

The rosaries had been taken, but the prayers were not. In the dark, without beads, the women went on praying for each other.

Hunger did what the officials had hoped. The daily portion, Sada said, was one small bowl of red-rice gruel with a single pickled plum, so that people who squatted down in the latrine could not stand up again and often fainted.¹Asking for water was useless. Those who had already recanted were living outside and working; "we begged them, 'please slip us some water in secret,' but they would not." The sick died saying, "Water, water."¹

Then she adds the hardest sentence in her account. "When the children said, 'I want water,' 'I'm hungry,' many parents could not bear to hear it, and recanted."¹She does not condemn them, and neither should we. The parish history notes that most of those who gave way on the journey returned to the faith after they came home, and did penance for it.²

Sada did not give way. Around the fifteenth of the second month, she said, so many had died that officials came to see, took the survivors out, interrogated them, and pressed them: "Recant." "I will not recant," she answered.¹After that the survivors were moved to longhouses about a ri away, the men and the women a ri apart.¹Urakawa dates the move from the stable to the sixteenth of the first month of Meiji 4 and connects it with news that a government inspector was coming; the parish history names him as Kusumoto Masataka, and from then on housing and food improved.⁵¹In the new longhouses the women received four gō of white rice a day and cooked for themselves.⁵

In the third month of Meiji 6, in the spring of 1873, the exiles were called to the government office. Urakawa preserves the words they heard: "From now you will be sent home. Religion is left to each person's freedom." He writes that they could hardly believe it, and wondered if it was a trick and they were being taken away to be killed.⁶Before they left, the officials took them to see Wakaura and gave them a feast. They crossed to Osaka by river boat and went home by steamer with four officials from Tokyo, who praised their courage and gave each man three bu and each woman two bu for the road. They reached Nagasaki on the seventh of April 1873 by the Western calendar, Palm Sunday.⁶The parish history adds that the fifty-three from Wakayama were the first of all the exiles to arrive home.²

Home was not easy. In September 1873, of the 1,900 who returned, 736 had no house to go back to.²Sada's second memoir passage, about this time, is the one the site's Hand to Hand history quotes. With the little silver the government gave them, the family bought the cheapest food there was: kankoro, dried sweet potato slices, three years old, because last year's were too dear. "They were full of worms. We had no pot or kettle, so we soaked them in water and ate them as they were. The worms floated up, but there was no time to pick them out one by one. We ate the worms too." They picked up chipped bowls, pulled the weeds by hand, and dug holes for bean and radish seed with bits of broken pottery.²

And then she says what the whole story has been about. "But it was not hard. It was much better than the journey. We could work freely, and we could say our prayers out loud." On Sundays the family walked to Mass at Ōura, about two ri from Ipponki, "and it never once seemed far."²The parish history, telling the same story, remarks that the chance to pray aloud was what their ancestors had waited for through seven generations and two hundred and fifty years.²

The rosary prayed aloud in the snow in 1870, the prayers whispered without beads in the dark of the stable, the prayers said out loud in a broken house in 1873: Sada's account is the story of one woman's voice, silenced and then given back.