The island of the sick
Kashiragashima is a small island off the east coast of Nakadōri, in the northern Gotō Islands. The school guide for Shin-Kamigotō says it was uninhabited until about the middle of the 19th century, except for sick people brought from other places to live there. The prefecture calls it a place of convalescence that people kept away from.
That made it useful. , a local leader, wanted to open the island but found no one willing to go. So he invited people from the Tainoura district, who were hidden Christians. By moving with a man who was not a Christian, the school guide says, they could keep what they believed out of sight. The prefecture says the same: they settled under a Buddhist pioneer, camouflaging their faith.
the prefecture's heritage site says settlers came in the late 18th century; the school guide says the island was empty until the mid-19th century.
Bones in the sand
In 1995 an excavation at the Shirahama site found human bones from the time of the ban, buried in a way only Christians used. Up the hill at Tashiro, the settlers cut the steep slopes into fields for sweet potatoes. They brought the skill of dry-stone walling from , and their stone walls and stone-sided huts still stand.
A priest on the island
After the Discovery at in 1865, Kashiragashima's hidden Christians went secretly to the church to meet the missionaries. , a leader of the hidden Christians of Sotome and the upper Gotō, moved to the island in 1867 and built his house here. That same year the islanders invited from Ōura to say Mass. Note: Christianity was still banned in 1867.
Matsujirō's house became a "". In 1887 the first wooden church was built near it.
Sources: a priest on the island
The World Heritage panel and the Shin-Kamigotō school guide give the official account; the prefecture's cultural properties database gives the building history and designation. The 1867 Mass comes from the prefecture's heritage site.
Ten years of stone
When the wooden church grew old, the islanders decided to build in stone. Work began in 1910. The families of a small hamlet put all their strength into it, and it took ten years: the church was finished in 1919. , the Gotō master carpenter, designed and built it. The school guide says the believers worked together with stone cut nearby. The prefecture's heritage site describes walls of , sandstone from the coast around the island, a round window, and an octagonal dome sheathed in copper on the bell tower.
Inside it is a surprise: a pastel interior covered in flowers, against the heavy stone outside. The database calls it one of the few stone churches in western Japan, and outstanding among the island churches.
Two churches across the strait
Across the strait on Nakadōri, Tetsukawa's other churches tell the same story in brick. At Aosagaura the believers carried the bricks up from the shore in 1910. At Ōso, near Aokata, the first wooden church of 1879 was moved to Wakamatsu, where it became Doinoura church, and Tetsukawa built a brick church in 1916, banded with dark under an octagonal dome.
