Mass in the headman's house
On August 15, 1880, the feast of the Assumption, about 1,500 Catholics crowded into the old house of their village headman for Mass. The partitions had been taken out, leaving only the pillars under the roof, and a light earth wall closed in the space.
The house stood on a rise called Takaya, in the middle of Urakami, the farming valley just north of Nagasaki whose families had kept their Christian faith in secret through the centuries of the ban. For more than two hundred years the headmen had called them here every New Year to tread on images of Christ and Mary. Ten years earlier, in the garden, they had been sentenced to exile. Now the house was theirs.
The headmen of Takaya
The house went back to 1605, when the part of Urakami that is now the Catholic parish was taken under the shogun's direct rule as the village of Urakami Yamazato. Its first headman was Kikuchi Masashige, a masterless samurai from Higo, in Kyūshū. His house stood on the Takaya rise, and he took the name Takaya. Until the end of the shogunate, the Christians of Urakami lived under the Takaya headmen. Yamazato had five hamlets, and in four of them every farming family was Christian.
The house had the best ground in the village, high and dry in the middle of the valley. The headmen took part in every arrest and examination of Christians, and every New Year they summoned the villagers to the house for the treading.
New Year at Takaya
The treading began at Urakami in 1641. The fumi-e, a holy image laid on the ground to be stepped on, went round in the New Year month of the old calendar: the town of Nagasaki first, then Nagasaki village, then Urakami Yamazato and Urakami Fuchi. Young and old, men and women, the sick and babies in arms, everyone stepped on it. Anyone who would not was known at once for a Christian and arrested.
For the Hidden Christians of Urakami it was the saddest and most painful thing of all. They asked pardon for it with the Konchirisan, the prayer of perfect contrition handed down for a people with no priest to hear their confessions.
The headman who informed, 1790
Not every headman was content to watch. In 1790 Takaya Eizaemon and his kinsmen planned eighty-eight stone Buddhas for the temple of Enpukuji, and many villagers refused to give money. Eizaemon secretly denounced nineteen of them as Christians, and the arrests were led by Tsukada Gunbei, a clerk of the Nagasaki intendant whom he had bribed. The evidence was not there. When the plot came out, Eizaemon was confined in September 1791 and had to hand the headmanship to his son, Tōkurō.
It was the first of the Urakami crackdowns, and the affair dragged on until 1795. Two more crackdowns followed, in 1839 and in 1856.
The refusal and the sentence, 1867 to 1870
Nagasaki's last treading came at the New Year of 1857, after the Dutch factor Donker Curtius urged the shogunate to stop it. Ten years later, in 1867, two years after Urakami's Christians had found the French missionaries at Ōura, they stopped pretending to be Buddhists. Ten representatives of the four hamlets went to the headman to say they were breaking with the family temple, and more than 400 households followed with written refusals of the temple registration. The magistrate's raid of July 15, 1867, began the fourth crackdown.
On January 6, 1870, the day after the heads of household had been shipped out of Nagasaki, the families left behind came to the headman's house in groups. Flags marked East, West, South and North stood in the garden, and officials called each name and sent each person to stand under a flag. Marnas adds that they were told to board the ships or be shot where they stood.
Kataoka Sada set out that snowy morning with one daughter on her back and two by the hand. She remembered going to "the paddy below the Yamazato headman's house" and then on to the government office, praying the rosary aloud all the way. In all, 3,394 people were sent away, and Urakami was left empty.
The house for sale
The exiles came home in 1873 to wrecked and empty houses. Their secret chapels had been destroyed, and for Mass they walked to Ōura Cathedral, about 2 ri (8 km) away. In 1879 Aikawa Chūemon of Doi, back from the "journey", as the exiles called it, arranged with Father Poirier to make his elder brother Tomohachi's detached room by the river into a chapel. Dedicated to St. John the Baptist, it held about 200 people.
The headman's family, meanwhile, had fallen. Kanjūrō, the headman who had gathered the villagers for exile, died soon afterward. His eldest son, sent to the coal mine on Takashima to mend his ways, was killed there in a gas explosion. The new government had ended hereditary office, and the running of the village passed to an elected man. The widow was left with a sickly twelve-year-old son and no stipend. She cut and sold the trees that had surrounded the house, and at last put the whole estate up for auction and left the village.
The Catholics of Urakami worked to get it, and on June 4, 1880, the feast of the Sacred Heart, they signed the contract. The price was only 1,600 yen, at a time when a 60 kg bale of rice cost 2 yen 64 sen. On July 7, the feast of the 205 Blessed Martyrs of Japan, they began work on the house, and on August 15 they filled it for Mass. Marnas called it the old court of Urakami "changed into a sanctuary."
The headman's house as a church
The next year, 1881, the parish raised a wooden cross on a hill at Tsuji, now Jūjikayama, in reparation for the treading and in thanks that the persecution was over.
The headman's house served as the parish church for thirty-five years. It could hold about 1,400 people, Marnas reported, and still on Sundays the crowd could not all get in. The roof leaked, the timbers were rotting, and the parish grew to more than 5,000.
In September 1888 Father Fraineau, the new parish priest, began to plan a great church on the headman's ground, where for 250 years the cross had been trodden underfoot, as reparation for that sacrilege. Building began in 1895. When stone and brick were landed at Doi, the parishioners carried them "to the building site on the Takaya hill."
In 1902 the old house was moved to the east side, behind the rising church, and went on serving as the chapel. It was replaced when Urakami Cathedral was dedicated in March 1915, at the fiftieth anniversary of the day Urakami's Christians made themselves known at Ōura. The old house then became the catechism hall.
In a book that Father Urakawa quoted in 1928, the historian Anesaki Masaharu described the site: the former headman's estate, where in the persecution people had been summoned and scolded, now carried "the greatest cathedral in the East."
The persimmon tree
At the front of the finished cathedral, on the right, stood a persimmon tree, with a large natural stone beside it. The spot had been the entrance of the headman's house. Parish memory, set down in the parish's own history, held that the ancestors had been tied to that tree and tormented when they were examined for their religion. The stone was the headman's water basin, which, they said, had watched it all in silence. Photographs survive of the old house with the tree at its right edge, and of Father Fraineau and his parishioners beside it.
An older witness points the same way. In 1897 Marnas wrote that many Christians could testify they had been tortured on the Takaya headmen's orders, and that several remembered being tied to a tree that still grew in the middle of the main courtyard.
1945 and 1946
The atomic bomb of August 9, 1945, wrecked the cathedral. The persimmon tree burned, and so did the old headman's house.
A year later, in August 1946, the young men of the parish set out to restore the weekly round of Communion visits, district by district. They dug the root of the persimmon tree out of the ashes and made it into a cross, the Cross of the Communion Round, which went from district to district each week to call everyone to Communion. The parish says it is still carried every Sunday, handed on from district to district as the baton of the liturgy rota.
