The church in the castle
In 1574 Ukon's father, , built a church inside the castle, near today's Nomi shrine. According to the missionary it was a large wooden church with a house for the missionaries, and in a corner of a beautiful garden with a pond stood a great cross. From here the faith spread among the retainers and people, and for a time Takatsuki stood with Kyoto and Sakai as a centre of the mission in the Kinai.
East of the shrine, excavation found the Christian cemetery that lay beside the church, buried under Edo-period fill up to two metres thick. Adults and children lay in orderly rows. One coffin lid carried a painted in ink, and a wooden rosary had been laid with the dead, the oldest such finds from any excavation in Japan. They also show that Fróis's account was true.
Sources: the church in the castle
Fróis's letters describe the church; the city's excavations of the cemetery confirm them. Takatsuki City's cultural heritage office publishes both.
The young lord
Ukon met the faith at twelve, in 1564, and was baptised at Sawa castle, his father's seat in Yamato, taking the name Justo. The Jesuit brother baptised him. In 1573, at about twenty-one, after a struggle with Wada Korenaga, he became lord of Takatsuki with his father, took the town houses within the walls and made the castle strong. He served Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, led Hideyoshi's vanguard at Yamazaki in 1582, and brought noted commanders such as Kuroda Kanbei and Gamō Ujisato to baptism. He was also a man of the tea ceremony, counted among the seven great disciples of Sen no Rikyū.
In 1585 he was moved to a new domain at Akashi in Harima.
What he gave up
When Hideyoshi ordered the missionaries out in 1587, Ukon would not bend. He lost his domain and was hidden for a time on Shōdoshima by ; in 1588 welcomed him to Kanazawa. Pope Sixtus V wrote him a letter in his praise. When the Tokugawa banned the faith in 1614 he was sent abroad from Nagasaki to Manila, where he died of fever early in 1615.
The Church sees in him a model of fortitude in faith: rather than compromise, he gave up honours and comfort and accepted humiliation and exile, and he died repeating the name of Jesus. He was beatified as a martyr on 7 February 2017.
Statues and a church modelled on Manila
The castle was pulled down in 1874 and its stones used to build the Kyoto to Osaka railway. Its site is now Shiroato Park, with a stone statue of Ukon, and the Shiroato history museum nearby shows a rosary and other things connected with him. Since 1979 Takatsuki and Manila have been sister cities, and a statue of Ukon stands in Plaza Dilao in Manila. The Catholic church of Takatsuki, built in 1962, was modelled on the cathedral of Our Lady near Manila, where Ukon ended his life; in its forecourt is a statue of him in Italian marble, given by the superior general of the Claretians.
