Moriyama Jinzaburō: "Please Tie Me"

Moriyama Jinzaburō was the eldest son of Moriyama Kunitarō, a Christian of Nakano-gō in the village of Urakami.¹His sister Matsu was a catechist, and his younger brother Yūjirō was still a boy when the family's troubles began.¹²After 1865, when the Urakami Christians found the priests at Ōura, the people of Nakano built a thatched chapel that Father Laucaigne named for Saint Francis Xavier.³

On the night of 14 to 15 July 1867, Jinzaburō was sleeping in that chapel with two other young men, Matsuda Kisuke and Sanada Zennosuke. In his own account he wrote that about two in the morning they saw some thirty lanterns coming, and began trying to hide the holy things before the constables arrived.³Zennosuke slipped out through a window; Kisuke was seized. The Catholic historian Urakawa Wasaburō tells what Jinzaburō did. He went calmly on taking down the holy pictures and stacking them in the confessional, and then knelt in front of the constables, put his hands behind his back and said: "Please tie me."²In his own words, the constables, who believed Christians could work magic, were frightened by his calm, would not come near him, and threw the rope from a distance; three of them tied him so hard that he fainted on the way and had to be brought round with water.³Urakawa gives his age as twenty-one.²

He was one of sixty-eight people arrested that night.⁴It was the start of the fourth and last persecution of Urakami.

In 1868 the new Meiji government sent 114 of the leading Urakami Christians into the custody of the domains of Tsuwano, Hagi and Fukuyama.⁷Urakawa writes that those sent to Tsuwano, a small castle town in the mountains of Iwami, were all chosen from the most steadfast: old men such as Kunitarō and Takagi Sen'emon, and young men such as Yasutarō, Wasaburō, Tomohachi and Jinzaburō.⁵There were twenty-eight of them, held at the temple of Kōrinji, at the place now called Otome-tōge.⁵⁶

The domain's officials tried argument first and then hunger. Urakawa records that the prisoners were given less than three gō of rice a day with a little salt and water and no other food, and in winter they still wore the thin summer clothes they had come in. They pasted their daily sheet of tissue paper together with grains of rice to make undershirts, and slept two by two in each other's arms on the freezing floor.⁵Eight gave in early and were taken to a nearby nunnery, the Hōshin'an.⁵The others cut a hole in the floor with sharpened coins and slipped out at night to beg food from the very people who had given in; Urakawa notes that the Tsuwano apostates, unlike some elsewhere, received them kindly, warmed them, and sent them back with scraps.⁵

When the young Yasutarō was dying in the three-foot cage, a box too low to stand in and too short to lie in, Jinzaburō and Sen'emon went to him by the secret hole. The Diocese of Hiroshima's account says that Jinzaburō asked him if he had a message for his mother, and Yasutarō answered: "Tell her that I am thinking of the three-foot cage as the cross, and I am dying gladly."⁶Urakawa gives Yasutarō's words a little differently: he said that every night a lady like the Virgin in the holy pictures came and comforted him, and asked that no one be told while he lived.⁵

The officials singled Jinzaburō out because he was young. Urakawa tells how three of the domain's samurai invited him alone to a house, set a feast in front of the starving young man, and then bowed low before him. If he would not give in, they said, they had been ordered to cut their own bellies; he was too young to be thrown away. Jinzaburō heard them out. Then he answered that he had already stood before the Nagasaki magistrate many times and left his parents and his home rather than change his religion: if he gave in now, all his sufferings would be wasted.⁵Another time an official told him he would be taken into the hills next day and beheaded. Jinzaburō replied that "Jinzaburō's head is not so cheap": he had been arrested by order of the Emperor, and in Nagasaki even a robber was not executed without a proper sentence and a reference to the capital.⁵The official had no answer.

On the twenty-sixth day of the eleventh month of Meiji 2, in the winter of 1869 to 1870, in heavy snow, Jinzaburō and Sen'emon were called out together, though Sen'emon was ill with fever. They were stripped; the scapular of Our Lady that each wore was thrown down and trodden on. Then they were pushed into the pond in front of the court, which was covered with thick ice.⁵Urakawa writes that the water came up to their chins on a shallow place in the middle. They raised their eyes and joined their hands. Sen'emon said the Our Father; Jinzaburō said the prayer of offering of oneself. The officials called from the room: "Sen'emon, Jinzaburō, can you see Deus?"⁵

When Sen'emon began to lose consciousness he said: "Jinzaburō, the world is spinning round. I am going like this; are you ready?" The officials shouted to them to come out. Sen'emon, Urakawa writes, forced his stiffening tongue to speak: "Jinzaburō, we are in a mountain of treasure. Don't think of coming out. Today we go together, hand in hand." The two did not come out; they had no strength to. The guards pulled them out by the hair with a hooked bamboo pole and warmed them by a fire.⁵Sen'emon was sent back to the others. Jinzaburō, "young as he is, he gets in the way of the others", was put into the three-foot cage.⁵

The next day, Urakawa adds, three more men were put in the pond, among them his father Kunitarō, aged sixty-six. A servant bringing Jinzaburō his food told him that Kunitarō had said he would give in if his son did, and urged him to surrender out of filial duty. He answered that keeping the faith was a matter for each person: if Kunitarō gave in, he would keep it in his place, and if Kunitarō did not, he would follow his father. Either way, he would not give in.⁵Urakawa, who admired him, is honest that Jinzaburō had a young man's pride: he hoped to be taken to Edo and die at the execution ground of Suzugamori before a great crowd, with a farewell poem.⁵

At the end of 1869, the rest of the Urakami families were sent into exile, and a hundred and twenty-five more came to Tsuwano.⁵Before he and the eleven who remained of the first group were moved, Jinzaburō chewed a piece of bamboo into a brush, made ink from charcoal and spit, and wrote on a scrap of paper a message for the newcomers: "You who come after, men, take Saint Paul as your model, and women, Saint Agnes, and endure well. The twelve who came first are still in the new prison, unchanged." He left it folded in the privy, where his sister Matsu found it.⁵

The hunger and the punishments fell then on the families. His brother Yūjirō, a boy, was tied to a cross of cedar poles, set naked on a bamboo veranda in the autumn cold and beaten for fourteen days; the officials made Jinzaburō heat the bath so that he would hear his brother's cries.⁵Yūjirō died on the twenty-sixth day of the eleventh month of Meiji 3, in January 1871. Jinzaburō came in secret through the dark to sit with him on his last night.⁵⁶His father Kunitarō had died a few weeks earlier, and his brother Jinkichi in the summer.⁵⁶

By 1871, after a visit from officials of the Foreign Ministry, conditions eased.⁵Jinzaburō and four others slipped out of the prison. Urakawa tells how they travelled by boat to Kobe and found the "French temple with the cross", where Father Villion was saying Mass; the next day they went to the church at Kawaguchi in Osaka, made their confessions, and were given medals, crosses, rosaries and money for the road. On the way home they visited the exiles held at Fukuyama.⁵Then, after twenty-two days, Jinzaburō went back into the prison at Tsuwano, and shared what he had brought.⁵

He was free, and he went back. Those he had left behind needed the medals and the news that priests were still near.

In 1873 the order came to send the exiles home.⁵Jinzaburō went back to Urakami. He had written down, in order of death and with their baptismal names, the thirty-three who had died in prison at Tsuwano. The Diocese of Hiroshima's committee for the cause of the Tsuwano martyrs calls his memorandum a precious source: it is how two of the dead, Catherine Iwanaga Mori and Catherine Matsuo Kame, are known at all. The memorandum is kept at the Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum in Nagasaki.⁶