Ōkubo Toshimichi and the Urakami question

Ōkubo Toshimichi was never a Christian, and the sources used here record no word of his for or against the faith of the Urakami villagers. Yet the story of their exile, from 1868 to 1873, runs through the years in which he was at the centre of power, and two documented moments tie him to its end.¹⁴⁵The French missionary historian Francisque Marnas, writing in 1897 from the archives of the Paris Foreign Missions, singled him out for praise alongside Iwakura Tomomi.⁶

He was born on the 10th day of the eighth month of Bunsei 13, in 1830, in the castle town of Kagoshima, the son of a low-ranking samurai of Satsuma.¹When his father was banished in the succession dispute of 1849, the family fell into poverty, and the young man was drawn into the circle of reform-minded junior samurai.¹Under Shimazu Hisamitsu he rose to the centre of Satsuma's politics; with Saigō Takamori he moved from reconciling court and shogunate to overthrowing the shogunate; and with Iwakura Tomomi he carried out the coup of 1868 that restored imperial rule.¹In the new government he served as counsellor, joined Kido Takayoshi in returning the domains to the throne in 1869, and became finance minister before the abolition of the domains in 1871.¹

The new government began by keeping the old ban. One of the notice boards it ordered every village to post in the third month of 1868 declared: "The wicked sect of the Kirishitan is strictly forbidden."⁴The Christians of Urakami, who had declared their faith since meeting Father Petitjean at Ōura in 1865, were by then refusing Buddhist funerals and being arrested.⁹¹⁰On the 17th day of the fourth month of 1868, the Nagasaki prefecture heritage site records, the government decided on their exile.¹⁰Burkman, writing from the diplomatic records, says Kido Takayoshi first proposed that the leaders be beheaded, and that the Shinto scholar Fukuba Bisei persuaded the government to use exile alone.⁵¹¹Over the next two years more than three thousand men, women and children were sent to some twenty domains.²⁹

Ōkubo was among the leaders of that government, but the sources used here do not say what part, if any, he took in the decision (Unverified).¹

One document carries his signature. For more than two centuries every Japanese had been registered each year as a parishioner of a Buddhist temple in the shūmon ninbetsu-chō, the religious inquiry registers created to root out Christianity.⁴In 1871, as the new household registration law came into force, Ōkubo as finance minister and his deputy Inoue Kaoru submitted an opinion to the Council of State that, since the new household registers would record each person's shrine and temple, "the religious registers hitherto submitted should naturally be abolished." The registers were abolished on the 3rd day of the tenth month of 1871.⁴The historian Miyama Jun'ichi stresses that the senior officials thought of the registers as a census rather than as a tool of faith; the religious control they had served passed instead, for a time, to a new system of compulsory registration at Shinto shrines.⁴

Ōkubo also received the harder line. Watanabe Noboru, who directed the persecution in Nagasaki, wrote to Hirosawa Saneomi and Ōkubo in the third month of 1871 urging that shrine registration be imposed across the country, and declared that once the expulsion of Christianity had been resolved upon it must be carried through "even if it comes to war." How the two men answered, Miyama writes, is not known.⁴

In December 1871 Ōkubo sailed from Yokohama as one of four vice-envoys of the embassy led by Iwakura Tomomi.³⁸Its purpose was to present the new government's credentials, open talks on revising the unequal treaties, and study the West.⁸It met, everywhere, the Urakami question. When it reached San Francisco on 15 January 1872, Burkman writes, it found a nation that knew little of Japan beyond vague notions of the Mikado and "the notorious Urakami kuzure"; missionaries in Japan, Protestant as well as Catholic, had been writing home about the deportations for years.⁵⁸In Washington, Burkman records, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish put religious freedom into his draft treaty, and when Iwakura asked whether it would apply only to foreigners, answered that everyone in Japan "should have liberty to think as he pleases."⁵

In May 1872 Ōkubo and Itō Hirobumi went back to Japan to obtain fuller powers. They carried three proposals from the leaders of the embassy; the third was that the anti-Christian notice boards be removed. "Although the practice of foreign religions is clearly prohibited by the laws of Japan," it read, "we should remove the regulations which forbid this from the public noticeboards. When foreigners read them, they think of us as barbarous people who have no respect for religious freedom and they therefore deny us equal rights."⁵

In Europe the pressure grew. On 7 December 1872 the French deputy Desbassayns de Richemont denounced the treatment of Japan's Catholics before the National Assembly, and the foreign minister promised to press the embassy on toleration.⁵⁶In Brussels, Marnas writes, the crowd that pressed round the envoys' carriages "went so far as to call loudly for the deliverance of the Japanese Christians."⁶After a demonstration by Belgian Catholics, Burkman says, Itō telegraphed home asking for the exiles' release and the withdrawal of the edict.⁵

Not every voice abroad pressed the same way. In London the British minister to Japan, Sir Harry Parkes, home on leave, persuaded the Foreign Office and the missionary societies that foreign pressure might only harden Japanese feeling, and Lord Granville urged a more liberal policy only mildly.⁵In Berlin, where Ōkubo was struck by Bismarck's state, the envoys asked the jurist Rudolf Gneist whether Japan should adopt Christianity as a state religion; Gneist advised against it, saying that no religion could be enforced by decree.²⁵The German writer H. Ritter, quoted by Burkman, saw in the very question a sign of "the essentially changed current of thought in influential circles," the change "which took the edicts against Christianity from the public noticeboards."⁵Letters from members of the embassy, Burkman adds, stressed that releasing the Urakami Christians would markedly improve Japan's image in Europe.⁵

The protests of the European governments, Marnas wrote, were enough to show the envoys that liberty of conscience was the first condition for a people that wished to take its place among civilised nations. "To the credit of Iwakura, of Ōkubo and the other members of the embassy, we must say that, breaking with old prejudices, they understood it, and had the courage themselves to ask for the release of all the Christian prisoners."⁶

On 24 February 1873 the government issued Council of State proclamation no. 68, and the anti-Christian notice boards came down; in March the order went out to bring the Urakami exiles home.⁸Ōkubo himself returned to Japan in May 1873.²The exiles, nearly two thousand of them, came back to burned and stripped houses at Urakami and began again.⁹⁸

Historians weigh his part differently. Burkman argues that the trend towards toleration had already gathered strength at home by 1871, and that the embassy brought it to a head.⁵Miyama sums up the common view that the government removed the boards because it put diplomacy before the ban, not because it had embraced religious freedom; the Nagasaki heritage site makes the same point, adding that true freedom of faith took many more years.⁴¹⁰Marnas, for his part, credits the envoys' own change of mind.⁶All three agree that the faith of the exiles was what forced the question.

Back in Japan, Ōkubo defeated the plan to send Saigō to Korea in 1873, founded the Home Ministry and, as home minister, became in effect the head of the government.¹²In 1874 he went in person to put down the rising at Saga; Marnas notes with satisfaction that "not one" of the Christians of Kyushu was found among the rebels, who stayed as loyal to their Emperor as they had stayed loyal to God in persecution.⁶In 1877 he crushed the Satsuma rebellion led by his old friend Saigō.¹

On the morning of 14 May 1878, on his way by carriage to the Council of State at the temporary palace in Akasaka, he was attacked and killed by disaffected former samurai at Shimizudani in Kōjimachi.¹⁷A memorial raised in 1888 still stands there, in what is now Shimizudani Park.⁷The Urakami Christians whose cause he had carried back from Washington were by then rebuilding their village. In 1880 they bought the house of the village headman, where their families had once trodden on the fumi-e every New Year, and made it their church; Urakami Cathedral stands on that ground.⁹