A desert to be watered
Gotō Juan was born in 1577 as Iwabuchi Matagorō, third son of the lord of Fujisawa castle in Iwai. After his elder brother fell to Toyotomi Hideyoshi he wandered far from home, and in Nagasaki he came to the faith. In 1597 he was baptised on Uku island in the Gotō Islands, and took the name Gotō Juan. In 1616 , who hoped to learn from him about the West, made him through Hasekura Tsunenaga the adopted brother of his retainer Gotō Nobuyasu and granted him Fukuhara in Isawa. So Gotō Juan became a vassal of Date Masamune and lord of the residence at Fukuhara. The inscription on his mausoleum remembers him as a ruler who always treated his people with kindness, and who, seeing their poverty, gave away his own wealth and even borrowed to help them.
In 1618 he began to dig a to bring the water of the Isawa river onto the dry terraces. The work was hard: he was trying to lift water from a fierce river to the upper part of the terrace, and it took new knowledge and invention. He dug 1,700 metres, from Kanenyūdō on the upper Isawa to Ōchigai, before the work stopped.
Sources: a desert to be watered
The Isawa Plain Land Improvement District, which still runs the canal, tells the story on its site and records the mausoleum and its inscription. Juan's Christian life and his exile come from the Jesuit Annual Letters, retold by Hubert Cieslik SJ, and from Sakurai Yasuto's study of Peter Kasui Kibe, which sketches Juan's life.
A Christian land
Under Juan, his lands at Mizusawa, which the Jesuits called Miwake, were entirely Christian, and while Sendai itself was too dangerous, the Jesuits made it the centre of their mission in the north. From here the priests went out to Tsugaru, Akita, Nanbu, Mogami and Yonezawa. Masamune let Juan keep his faith in secret on three conditions: no priest to live in his lands, nothing done to spread the faith, and silence about the permission.
At Christmas 1623 Father Diogo kept the feast with Juan and his people. On the Epiphany a letter came from the Superior General of the Society of Jesus naming Juan a special benefactor of the Society, with a share in all its spiritual goods. It was the last Christmas of the Christian community of Miwake.
The choice
Masamune protected his Christian retainer and urged him to give up his faith. Juan would not. Masamune wrote to him himself, and friends begged him to yield at least for appearances; he stood firm. Under strict orders from the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu, Masamune at last sent men after him, and Juan went away with twelve of his followers. In February 1624 the domain's men took his house and burned the homes of the Christians; the next day Juan set out for exile in Nanbu, the Jesuit letter says. The canal's keepers say only that no one knows where he went. Carvalho, hidden in the mountains above, was taken a few days later, questioned at Mizusawa and led to his death at Sendai.
Fifteen years later, in 1639, the Jesuit Peter Kasui Kibe, the first Japanese pilgrim to Jerusalem, was arrested at Mizusawa too, where a Christian couple had sheltered him; he died a martyr in Edo.
The neighbours finish the work
The same year, 1624, brought a terrible drought; the rice fields dried white and cracked, and the lower Isawa suffered worst. Two men of nearby villages, of Kojō and of Maesawa, took up Juan's work. Like him they were Christians. With the help of many farmers they overcame the difficulties and finished the canal in 1631; it is the present upper Juan canal, more than 20 km long. The water reached the middle of the plain and turned uncertain fields along small streams into a great rice land.
The mausoleum and the garden
In 1931 the Juan canal water users' association and local people gave the materials and the labour to build a mausoleum. Its inscription is in Japanese and Latin, and inside is a statue of Juan. Around it, on the place where his residence is said to have stood, is the small Gotō Juan garden, with the mausoleum and an old samurai house of the late Edo period, the Yoshida house, moved here. Every May a festival of prayer remembers his work.
