Timbers by sea
In 1609 a ship came into Nagasaki loaded with the pieces of a church. The Dominicans, who had come to Japan from Manila, had been preaching in . When their leader, Father , was ordered out, he had the church of Our Lady of the Rosary dismantled and carried to Nagasaki. The city's own history magazine says the timbers came from the church at Kyōdomari, in present-day Satsumasendai, and were shipped across. The Japan Tourism Agency counts an earlier move too: a first church on Shimokoshiki island in 1602, moved to Sendai in 1606, and moved again to Nagasaki in 1609.
The land was a gift from , the magistrate of Nagasaki, himself a Christian baptised Antonio. The church was built of wood on stone foundations, and was one of the last churches built in the city. It was named for St Dominic, the founder of the order.
The Dominican historian Bertrand Wilberforce tells the story from the friars' side. The first church of the order in Japan, dedicated to Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, had been opened at Kyōdomari in Satsuma in 1606, with its first Mass on the feast of the Visitation. When the lord of Satsuma ordered the friars out in 1609, Morales went to Nagasaki, "the capital of Christianity in Japan", and took with him some lepers for whom he had founded a hospital, because he would not leave them to the mercy of strangers. There he founded a church under the name of Our Lady of the Rosary and St Dominic. Profillet dates the move to the first days of May 1609. In its inner garden, and in the vegetable garden, the friars set up crosses.
Morales did not leave Japan when the church fell. He was later taken in the Nagasaki house of his host, Andrew Tokuan, who led the men of the city's confraternity of the . Profillet gives the day, 15 March 1619: a young man under torture had revealed where the priest was living. The officer sent to take him, the renegade Yasuemon, greeted him with respect and asked his pardon. Morales answered: "You are welcome, Yasuemon-dono. Far from bearing you any bitterness, I am grateful to you, and I could know no greater happiness than to be a prisoner for Jesus Christ." From his first prison, on an island of the Hirado domain, a room two mats long, he wrote to the Spaniards of Nagasaki: "We have only the flowers and the roses; the Son of God kept the real trials for Himself." Note: our translations.
After more than two years in the prison of Ōmura he was brought back to Nagasaki and burned alive on 10 September 1622, the day of the Great Martyrdom. On the hill of Nishizaka he blessed Tokuan's wife Mary, who knelt at his feet, before they died. Pius IX beatified him.
Sources: timbers by sea
The church's history comes from the prefecture's おらしょ site, the Japan Tourism Agency's commentary and Nagasaki City's magazine Nagazine. They agree on 1609 and 1614 but tell the earlier journey differently, so it is marked Disputed below. The finds were made in the city's excavation.
The magistrates' houses
Five years later the ban on Christianity of 1612 to 1614 ordered all churches destroyed, and Santo Domingo was pulled down. Carla Tronu, in her study of Nagasaki's Christian spaces, dates the dismantling to 1615 and the residence of the magistrate, the , on top of it to 1619. On its ground the new magistrate, , built his mansion. Suetsugu, the city magazine notes, was the man who had brought a lawsuit against Murayama Tōan; Tōan was denounced as a Christian and executed in Edo in 1619, and Suetsugu took his post.
The Suetsugu held the office by inheritance until 1676, when they were caught in smuggling and fell. In 1663 the Kanbun fire burned almost the whole of Nagasaki, this house with it. The family then took over the duties, and from 1739 were magistrates in their own right until the end of the Edo period.
Found under a school
When the old school here was to be rebuilt, the remains of the church were found. the Japan Tourism Agency says the late 1990s; the prefecture says the survey took about a year from 2000. The survey found more than 120,000 objects and many building remains. The prefecture says the real surprise was that church remains had survived at all, since the magistrates' houses had been built on top of them.
The school was redesigned to keep them, and the museum lies beneath it. From a raised walkway you see the church's basement, a stretch of Iberian-style stone paving with drains, and a well of the Takagi period. Fifteen wells were found on the site, most of them from the Takagi house.
