The island of the gods
At the north end of Nozaki stands . For people across the Gotō Islands the island was holy ground, and they came to the shrine to pray. The prefecture says it was a sacred place of Shinto where ordinary people could not make their homes: only the shrine priest's house and about twenty households lived at Nozaki, on the east coast.
That is what drew the hidden Christians. In the 19th century some of those who had spread out from chose Nozaki as a place to settle, became , parishioners of the shrine, and hid their faith behind it. The school guide gives their reasoning: they thought that there they were unlikely to be suspected.
Two hidden villages
The hidden Christians made two villages: Nokubi in the centre of the island and Funamori in the south. In the middle of Nokubi are the remains of their leader's house, where the prefecture believes various religious rites were held in secret during the ban. Even the shrine helped: next to the priest's house stands a , a hall for praying to the shrine from afar on days when the sea was too rough, built during the ban, and the hidden Christians prayed there too.
Their graves look like temple graves. The school guide says the difference is underground: the dead were laid in the opposite direction.
A church built on sardines
After the ban was lifted, the people of Nozaki returned to the Catholic Church and built churches in both villages: Funamori in 1881 and Nokubi in 1882. The prefecture reads those two churches as the moment the age of hiding ended on the island.
In 1908 the seventeen households of Nokubi built a third church, of brick. It was the first brick church designed and built by , the Gotō carpenter who learned church building from French priests. The school guide says it was paid for with money the believers saved from fishing for , a small silver sardine. Inside is a ribbed vault.
Sources: a church built on sardines
The World Heritage panel and the Ojika school guide give the official account; the prefecture's tourism portal adds the seventeen households and Tetsukawa's first brick church.
The last Mass
The island emptied in the 20th century. The people of Funamori moved away together in 1966. At Nokubi the last Mass was said in 1971, and the building began to decay. The town of Ojika paid for a full restoration in 1985, and in 1989 the church was designated a cultural property by Nagasaki Prefecture. The shrine priest stayed longest: the school guide says he kept the shrine until 2001.
A church above an empty island
Nozaki is almost uninhabited now. The church still stands on its hill above the ruins of Nokubi. The path that joined Nokubi and Funamori, about 2.8 km, is described by the prefecture as a road of prayer walked for more than a hundred years. Since 2011 the Ojika islands have been an Important Cultural Landscape.
