The road to the cross
In 1561 the Jesuit Luis de came to Kasuga. He wrote that when he arrived, the road leading to the cross looked as it does when people are waiting for a procession of the Blessed Sacrament. A year later the village had its own Misericórdia, the "group of mercy" that cared for the sick and the poor.
That cross has gone. In the middle of the valley stands a small wooded hill, Maruo-yama, where the first Christians were buried. A guide for local schoolchildren says there were once a church and a cross in Kasuga, and that the cross may have stood on Maruo-yama.
How the faith came, and how it was left alone
Xavier brought Christianity to Hirado in 1550. The lord of the island's west coast, Koteda, became a Christian, and so the faith spread to Kasuga. A Jesuit letter of 1563 shows that the Christians of Kasuga had formed a , a confraternity.
In 1599 the Matsura lords of Hirado banned the faith, and the left the island. The Catholic bishops' history says Jerónimo Koteda and his cousin Baltasar went to Nagasaki with six hundred retainers. Missionaries still came secretly to Hirado after the national ban of 1614. After Father was martyred in 1622, none came again. From then on the kumi leaders kept the community together.
Sources: how the faith came, and how it was left
The World Heritage page sets out the history from Jesuit letters and village records. The prefecture's おらしょ site quotes Almeida's letter.
A mountain and an island
The leaders' houses had a Buddhist altar and a Shinto shelf like any other. In a back room, the nando, they hid their own holy things: the . The children's guide describes two of them. The otenpensha was a bundle of 46 cords with a metal cross at the tip, used to strike away illness. The okamisama were sixteen wooden tablets, one for Mary and fifteen for the events of her life.
Outdoors they prayed to Mt , the highest peak in the Hirado area, which had been a mountain of Buddhist and Shinto worship long before Christianity came. In the sixteenth century its temple, Saizenji, had been a strong enemy of the missionaries. Under the ban, a path ran up to the summit from Kasuga, and the whole village prayed there. On the summit is a small stone shrine that the hidden Christians called the "Kirishitan shrine". In their prayer of calling, the kamiyose no , the mountain is "Yasumandake-sama".
Out at sea they prayed to , the island where Christians had been executed, and drew holy water from it.
Gaspar Nishi on Ikitsuki
The Kotedas also ruled Ikitsuki, the island just north. was born there in 1556 and baptised at the age of two. When the Kotedas left in 1599 he stayed, and with his wife Ursula became a catechist of the island. He was charged with keeping the faith and baptising, and asked to die at Kurose-no-tsuji, where Father Cosme de Torres had raised a great cross in 1563. On 14 November 1609 he was beheaded there. Ursula and their son João died nearby at about the same time.
The Christians of Ikitsuki kept his grave through the years of hiding, and in 1993 a great cross was raised again at Kurose-no-tsuji. Gaspar's son Tomás Nishi was martyred at Nagasaki in 1634 and canonised in 1987.
No church
After 1865 the news of the Discovery at Ōura soon reached Hirado, and Catholic objects made abroad in the nineteenth century found their way into Kasuga's nandogami, a sign of contact with the Paris missionaries. But Kasuga did not return to the Catholic Church. Its people kept the faith as they had received it, and so there is no church in the village. Christians who kept the hidden faith in this way, outside the Church, are called . In the twentieth century the old forms faded, and today some families keep the objects privately.
The prefecture says the village's landscape has changed little since the sixteenth century.
