Story
A statesman, not a persecutor or a convert
Ōkubo Toshimichi was never a Christian, and the sources used here record no word of his for or against the faith of the 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.The French missionary historian Francisque Marnas, writing in 1897 from the archives of the Paris Foreign Missions, singled him out for praise alongside Iwakura Tomomi.This page sets out what the record shows, and what it does not.
From Satsuma to the new government
He was born on the 10th day of the eighth month of Bunsei 13, in 1830, in the castle town of , the son of a low-ranking samurai of Satsuma.When 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.Under 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.In 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.
The government that exiled Urakami
The new government began by keeping the old ban. One of the it ordered every village to post in the third month of 1868 declared: "The wicked sect of the is strictly forbidden."The Christians of Urakami, who had declared their faith since meeting Father at in 1865, were by then refusing Buddhist funerals and being arrested.On the 17th day of the fourth month of 1868, the prefecture heritage site records, the government decided on their exile.Burkman, writing from the diplomatic records, says Kido Takayoshi first proposed that the leaders be beheaded, and that the Shinto scholar persuaded the government to use exile alone.Over the next two years more than three thousand men, women and children were sent to some twenty domains.
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).
The end of the religious registers
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.In 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.The 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.
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.
Vice-envoy
In December 1871 Ōkubo sailed from Yokohama as one of four vice-envoys of the embassy led by Iwakura Tomomi.Its purpose was to present the new government's credentials, open talks on revising the unequal treaties, and study the West.It 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 "; missionaries in Japan, Protestant as well as Catholic, had been writing home about the deportations for years.In 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."
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."
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.In 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."After a demonstration by Belgian Catholics, Burkman says, Itō telegraphed home asking for the exiles' release and the withdrawal of the edict.
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.In 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.The 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."Letters from members of the embassy, Burkman adds, stressed that releasing the Urakami Christians would markedly improve Japan's image in Europe.
"To the credit of Iwakura, of Ōkubo"
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."
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.Ōkubo himself returned to Japan in May 1873.The exiles, nearly two thousand of them, came back to burned and stripped houses at Urakami and began again.
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.Miyama 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.Marnas, for his part, credits the envoys' own change of mind.All three agree that the faith of the exiles was what forced the question.
The last years
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.In 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.In 1877 he crushed the Satsuma rebellion led by his old friend Saigō.
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.A memorial raised in 1888 still stands there, in what is now Shimizudani Park.The 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 every New Year, and made it their church; stands on that ground.