Takagi Sen'emon: "Even If a Hundred Become One"

Sen'emon described himself to a Nagasaki official in 1867 as "an unlettered, water-drinking peasant" who knew only the outline of the teaching; for the details, he said, the official should ask the French priests.³He could not read the public notice boards that banned his faith, though he knew what they said "a hundred and a thousand times over" from others.⁴Yet when the crisis came, he was the one who spoke.

He was born in Tsuji in Motohara-gō, in the village of Urakami, in 1823 or 1824.⁴⁸Reference works report that his family descended from the Takagi family who had been intendants of Nagasaki, and that the family served the hidden community as baptizers (mizukata) through the centuries of persecution.⁸⁹After the Urakami Christians found the priests at Ōura in 1865, his house at Tsuji became one of the four secret chapels of the village, named for Saint Joseph.¹The Catholic historian Urakawa Wasaburō, telling of these years, calls him "Dominic Sen'emon".²

The first open clash came in April 1867. A villager named Sanpachi had buried his mother without calling the Buddhist priest, and the Christians decided to ask the intendant for permission to bury their dead themselves. The delegates were old men, and Sen'emon, afraid they would be too frightened to answer, went with them.³When the intendant's clerk asked why they would not call a monk, it was Sen'emon who replied: "We do not believe in the monks' teaching." He promised to obey the authorities in everything that concerned the body. "But you can command nothing in matters of the anima." Asked what the anima was, he explained: the soul, which does not die even when the body dies.³Before the two magistrates, when the old men fell silent, he spoke again from the lowest seat, and was cursed as an upstart for speaking before his elders.³

On the night of 14 to 15 July 1867 the constables raided the four chapels. At Saint Joseph's, Sen'emon wrote, he woke at about three in the morning to violent knocking and found his house already full of men; he was tied and beaten.¹Sixty-eight were arrested.¹

In the prisons the officials used the rope torture. Urakawa, drawing on Jinzaburō's recollections, describes men hung from the beams and beaten until they fainted; when the other prisoners heard the cries, they began to recant, and then all of them recanted. "The only one who held out to the end," Urakawa writes, "was Sen'emon."⁴Sen'emon's own account adds that when even his last companion gave way, he had urged him to hold on for the sake of the Lord, Saint Francis Xavier and the martyrs of Japan, and to endure "with the strength of the Holy Spirit".⁴

Then the head of the prisoners, a former samurai, tried to persuade him. He had no wife at home, only children; why not go home unharmed? Sen'emon thanked him. If he thought only of the body, he said, nothing could be kinder. "But when I think of the anima given me by the Lord of heaven, and of God to whom I owe so much, it would be the greatest misfortune. I fear no one. I fear only the Lord of heaven. Even if a hundred become one, I will not weaken. I have not lost the least part of my first resolve." The jailer answered that this was the same spirit as a samurai who fights for his lord to the last man, and said no more.⁴

Under interrogation, bound so tightly that he could barely speak, he told the officials that since the Christians had learned the faith, Urakami had changed: no quarrels, no heavy drinking, care for the sick, harder work in the fields. He would not say "I recant" with his mouth while keeping the faith in his heart, because that would be to deceive the authorities.⁴Urakawa, who knew the stories of the old Christians, says of him that the timid, uneducated man had been changed "by the grace of God"; he prayed in prison, offered himself to God every day and fasted every Friday.⁵

Released to the custody of the village, he came home alone on the fourteenth day of the ninth month. The villagers crowded round. "I have come back safely," he told them, "by the grace of God, and through the prayers of the bishop and all of you. But do not abandon those who came back having recanted."⁵The next night thirty-eight of those who had recanted went to the village headman at midnight and withdrew their recantation.⁵

Even the new magistrate, Kawazu, tried kindness. He received Sen'emon alone at night, told him the Christian teaching was good, that he had lived in France for three years and knew it, and asked only that Sen'emon keep the faith in his heart and outwardly follow the Buddhist way. Sen'emon answered that he could not believe in his heart alone. "The more you examine us," he said, "the more I want to keep this teaching."⁶Father Laucaigne, writing in his diary in January 1868 that everything had been destroyed, added: "No! The Saint Joseph chapel and the brave Sen'emon who built it still stand. There is still reason for hope."⁶

In 1868 the new government sent the 114 leaders of Urakami into exile; Sen'emon was among those sent to Tsuwano, a picked group of the firmest Christians.⁷¹The officials took away the mats, fed them less than three gō a day of barley and gruel with no side dish, and gave them only the thin summer clothes they had come in. At night the prisoners slept in pairs, holding each other for warmth.⁷Sen'emon went to the officials on behalf of everyone and asked for more food. "As things are, we cannot live. Surely this is not the Emperor's command. I do not think the Emperor is so merciless." Told that they had thrown their lives away anyway, he answered that his life was indeed given, but they had to stay alive until the matter was settled. He was refused.⁷

On the twenty-sixth day of the eleventh month of Meiji 2, at the end of 1869, he was sick with fever when he was summoned with Jinzaburō. When he still refused to give in, the officials stripped them and pushed them into a frozen pond.⁷In his own memorandum he wrote: "The cold was like being pierced with needles, so I said the orasho in a loud voice, and the officials in anger threw water on me from all sides."¹Urakawa, from the survivors' recollections, records what he said to the younger man when the officials called them out: "Jinzaburō, we are in a mountain of treasure. Don't think of coming out. Today the two of us go hand in hand."⁷They were dragged out by the hair with a hooked bamboo pole.⁷Back in the prison his companions took off their own clothes to cover him and lay on either side of him to warm him; and from that day, Urakawa says, his fever left him.⁷

Later he was shut in the three-foot cage with Jinzaburō and Tomohachi. When Fukahori Moichi, who had escaped from Fukuyama, came secretly with medals and crosses, the three crept out through a hole in the roof to meet him; Sen'emon, night-blind, held on to Jinzaburō's sash in the dark and fell with him into a stream. Moichi embraced them and wept.⁷

When the end came, the officials who had tormented them invited Sen'emon and three others to a meal and praised them: "If you were samurai, you would be fine samurai." They explained, as Urakawa reports it, that Tsuwano had been given the toughest of the Urakami men on purpose, as the price of a quarrel among the domains over how the Christians should be treated; Urakawa himself says he cannot tell whether that was true, only that the toughest were certainly at Tsuwano.⁷In 1873 the Tsuwano Christians walked home by way of Shimonoseki and Ōmura.⁷

At home Sen'emon went on serving. In 1874, when dysentery struck Urakami and Father de Rotz went among the sick, the young women who nursed with him, led by Iwanaga Maki, needed somewhere to live so as not to carry the disease to their families; Sen'emon offered his own hut. In the end he gave the whole of his house and land to Maki and her companions, who made it their convent and began to care for orphans.¹⁰Reference works credit him with a part in founding the congregation now called the Sisters of the Annunciation (Otsuge no Maria shūdōkai).⁹He died at Urakami on 13 April 1899.⁸⁹

The man who could not read left a memorandum of his sufferings, which his great-granddaughter Takagi Yoshiko has studied and published.¹¹It is the record of a man who said that he feared no one but God, and who, when he was the last one standing, asked his village not to abandon those who had fallen.