A carpenter's boy from Maruo
Tetsukawa Yosuke was born on 13 January 1879 at Maruo, on Nakadōri island in the Kamigotō, into a family of carpenters.He finished primary school and at fifteen began his apprenticeship.From a young man he worked on church building sites on the islands and beyond.
Those sites were run by French missionaries. Plans and handbooks were in foreign languages. Yosuke learned on the job, read the books in the original, and in his spare time went to meetings of the Architectural Institute, teaching himself the methods of Western building.Among the priests he worked with was the French missionary , and he learned much from him.In 1908 the journal of the Architectural Institute of Japan recorded his admission as an associate member, "Tetsukawa Yosuke, of Maruo, Uonome village".
The architectural historian Kawakami Hideto names four missionaries who were gifted builders and who taught the Japanese carpenters the forms and methods of Western church architecture: Joseph Marmand, Albert Pelu, Pierre Fraineau and Marc de Rotz.Tetsukawa first worked on a church at Sone, on Nakadōri, in about 1901 to 1902, when Father Pelu was the priest there. He sharpened his skills under Nohara, the master carpenter from Fukue who built Pelu's brick church at Dōzaki, blessed on 10 May 1908.
He was never a Christian. He was a Buddhist all his life.The prefecture's heritage writers say that through his friendship with the priests he came to understand the Christian spirit, and left messages of it all through his churches.
The first churches
In 1906 he took over the family business, which became the Tetsukawa-gumi.In 1907 he designed and built his first church, Hiyamizu on Nakadōri, all of timber, with a ribbed vault finished in plaster.
In 1908 the seventeen households of Nokubi on Nozaki island built a brick church. It was Tetsukawa's first brick church.Two years later, at Aosagaura on Nakadōri, about fifty Christian households carried the bricks up from the shore for him, and the church was finished in 1910.Each household gave twenty yen, at a time when a house could be built for a hundred, and gave its labour as well. The stone came from Kashiragashima and the bricks from Haiki near Sasebo, and the whole parish turned out to haul them up from the beach.
The great decade
The years that followed were his best. In 1913 he finished the church of Imamura, in the middle of the Chikugo plain in Fukuoka. Its priest, Father Honda, came from and had decided to become a priest while in exile during the persecution of 1868 to 1873. He wanted "a church with towers soaring into the sky" for the 7,200 Christians of Imamura who had kept the faith hidden for nearly three hundred years. It was paid for by gifts from abroad, above all from German Catholics, and by the people's own labour. The soft ground made the foundations very hard to build.In the same year Tetsukawa moved his office to .Imamura's twin towers were something new in his work. Kawakami traces them to one building above all: the great church that was slowly rising at Urakami.
Learning from Urakami
Father Pierre Fraineau had begun the Urakami church in 1895: a vast Romanesque church of stone and brick with a great dome, meant to be a great cathedral of the East. He made a large model, but, Kawakami writes, the plans existed only in the priest's head. In 1911 he collapsed from overwork, Father Emile Raguet carried the work on with a changed design, and the church was dedicated on 18 March 1915, after twenty years of building.All through those years Tetsukawa kept going to Urakami to watch it rise.De Rotz, who helped Fraineau with money and skill, also took the young builder to see the new prefectural office going up in Nagasaki.
De Rotz and Tetsukawa worked together on the bishop's house in Nagasaki, finished in 1915. The old priest spent two years thinking it out, and the two men took two months to design it; every drawing was made by Tetsukawa. De Rotz directed the work himself on site, but he did not live to see it finished. His mission's obituary says he died at Nagasaki on 7 November 1914 after a night of terrible suffering, and was carried back to Shitsu to lie in the grave he had prepared beside the cemetery cross.Kawakami says his death came from an accident during the work, and later Japanese accounts describe a fall from the scaffolding.In 1925 the twin towers of Urakami were finished at last, about a year after the parish priest began them, thirty years after the first stone; Kawakami credits Tetsukawa with completing them, the church he had learned from.
At Tabira, looking across the strait to , he began a church in December 1915; it was dedicated on 14 May 1918. The national heritage database calls it one of the most complete of the brick churches of Kyushu, and it is an Important Cultural Property.In 1916 he built the brick church of Ōso, near Aokata.
At Egami, on Naru island in the , he built a timber church in 1918 for a village that paid for it by selling kibinago, a small silver sardine.He also drew its altar: ears of wheat in a jug and a fruiting vine, for the body and blood of Christ, with roses for Mary. On the back of the drawing he wrote that it was made on 21 June 1917 "at the Minami-Tabira church building office, for Egami, Naru island, Gotō".With the statue of St Joseph at the centre, the altar shows the Holy Family.Tetsukawa had learned from de Rotz and Pelu the European habit of painting stone columns to look like marble; at Egami the wooden pillars carry a grain said to have been painted with a comb, and cherry blossoms are painted by hand on the window glass.The church stands by the sea with a stream in front, so he raised it on a high floor to let the air through; the foundation stones still carry shells from the shore they were taken from, and crosses shaped like flowers are cut into the eaves for ventilation.
And on Kashiragashima, a small island off Nakadōri, the families of a small hamlet spent ten years building a church of the island's own sandstone to his design. It was finished in 1919.They cut the stone from the islets nearby and brought it by sea at neap tide on calm days, two or three stones a day. They paid for it out of their living money, and when that was not enough they sold their hill land.
Concrete, and Urakami
In 1928 he built his first church in reinforced concrete.In 1934 his firm built the church at Sakitsu in Amakusa, on the very ground where, it is said, the villagers had once been made to tread on holy images.
So the last great work bearing his name came full circle. It was the rebuilding of , the church whose towers, by Kawakami's account, he had finished, destroyed by the . The Urakami parish records that the new cathedral was designed and built by Tetsukawa Kōmuten. Work began in March 1958, and it was finished in October 1959 and consecrated on 1 November. Poor old widows of the parish, the record says, gave the savings they had put by for their old age, "for God".
In 1958 he handed the firm to his son Yohachirō. The state honoured him with the Medal with Yellow Ribbon in 1959 and the Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1967.He died on 5 July 1976, aged ninety-seven.
Plans in a demolished house
When his old family house at Maruo was pulled down, a bundle of his plans and drawings, mostly for churches, was found inside. After a time at the local primary school they were given to the Geihinkan Museum at Arikawa, and thirty of them were conserved in 2016.A heritage writer counts more than fifty churches that he worked on; a national tourism text gives more than thirty; and about a dozen still stand across Kyushu.
The thread
Tetsukawa built for people whose families had prayed in secret for generations. Fishermen and farmers paid for his churches out of sardine money and widows' savings, and carried his bricks and stones up from the beach. He was not of their faith, but he gave them the most beautiful thing they had ever owned: a house of God that looked like one. He learned from priests who built churches with their own hands, and he helped to finish Urakami and to raise it again from the ashes. Several of his churches now stand within the sites of 2018.