Sixteen hundred yen
On 4 June 1880, the feast of the Sacred Heart, the Catholics of Urakami signed a contract to buy a house. The price was 1,600 yen.
It had belonged to the family, the hereditary headmen of the village. For two and a half centuries the Takaya had helped the magistrate's men arrest and question Urakami's hidden Christians, and every New Year they summoned the villagers to this house to tread on the . When the whole village was sent into exile in 1869, the sentences were read out here. After the Meiji reforms ended hereditary office, the family fell on hard times and sold everything.
On 15 August 1880 the first Mass was said in the old headman's house, now a temporary church. The parish history calls it the place where they had trodden on the images against their will, saying the prayer of contrition as they did it.
Sources: sixteen hundred yen
Most of the detail from 1879 to 1962 comes from the parish's own history of the cathedral, a single institutional source. The Japan Tourism Agency's commentary and the prefecture's heritage site confirm the outline: the headman's site, the dates of building, the bomb and the rebuilding.
A church in a boathouse
The exiles who came home in 1873 had no church. The four secret chapels of 1865 to 1867 had been destroyed, and to hear Mass they walked to . In 1879 a returned exile, Aikawa Chūemon, arranged with Father Poirier, Urakami's first parish priest, to turn a room of his brother's house at Doi, the boat landing on the Urakami River, into a chapel of St John the Baptist. It held about 200 people.
The headman's house replaced it in 1880. The next year the returned exiles raised a cross on a nearby hill, , in reparation for the treading and in thanks that the persecution was over.
The money will come down from heaven
By the late 1880s the old house was rotting, and on Sundays a congregation of more than 5,000 overflowed into the yard. In September 1888 Father Pierre-Théodore became parish priest and resolved to build a real church on the headman's ground. When he showed the plans to Bishop Cousin, the parish history says, the bishop asked where the money would come from. Fraineau answered that it would come down from heaven.
It came slowly. Fraineau went round the hamlets each month with a satchel, and families brought five or ten sen at a time. When stone and brick arrived at the Doi landing, parishioners competed to carry them up the hill. Work began in 1895. Fraineau died on 24 January 1911, aged sixty-four, before it was finished. His successor, Émile of the Paris Foreign Missions, simplified the design: no central dome, and an upper structure of timber and tile.
The church was dedicated to the Immaculate Conception. the parish history gives completion in 1914 and the on 18 March 1915; the Japan Tourism Agency and the prefecture give the consecration as 1914. The two front towers, 25 metres high, were finished in 1925 and held two French bells. People called it the largest church in East Asia. Unverified as a ranking: the parish says "it was said", and the tourism text says "one of the largest churches in Asia".
A few hundred metres from the hypocentre
At 11:02 on 9 August 1945 the atomic bomb exploded over Matsuyama-machi, a few hundred metres from the cathedral. Confessions were being heard before the feast of the Assumption. The parish priest, Father Nishida Saburō, and his assistant, Father Tamaya Fusakichi, were killed with the parishioners inside when the church collapsed and burned.
The right-hand tower fell straight down. The left-hand belfry, about ten tonnes, fell almost whole into the stream beside the church, where it still lies. Of the 84 angels, 33 lions and 14 saints on the building, only about twenty angels, two or three lions and three saints survived. The large bell came through almost unharmed; the small bell was smashed.
On 23 November 1945 about 600 surviving parishioners gathered before the ruins for a requiem, and read a eulogy. On Christmas Eve the big bell, dug from the rubble, was hung from three lashed logs and rang again over Urakami.
Rebuilding
In 1946 the parishioners, nearly all of them bomb victims or repatriates, cut timber from the burned hills and built a wooden church, blessed on 1 December 1946. The fallen belfry was too heavy to move, so the parish moved the stream instead.
The parish decided that rebuilding meant building as before, and that the surviving ruins had to go. The city's committee for atomic bomb remains asked for them to be kept, but the parish would not give up the headman's ground. Part of a side wall was moved to the hypocentre instead. The new cathedral in reinforced concrete was consecrated on 1 November 1959, and on 1 January 1962 it became the cathedral of the diocese in place of Ōura. Relics of three of the Twenty-Six Martyrs were placed in its main altar.
For twenty years it was bare grey concrete. Before Pope John Paul II's visit it was faced in 1980 with brick tiles, given stained glass and a rose window. On 25 February 1981 the Pope ordained priests here.
Two bells again
The cathedral seats a thousand. The fallen belfry still lies in the stream to the left of the church, and burned statues from the old façade stand beside the path. In the garden is the Torture Stone from , where Urakami exiles were made to sit until they died or gave up their faith.
In 2025 Catholics in the United States had a copy of the lost small bell made. It was blessed on 17 July 2025 and rang for the first time at 11:02 on 9 August 2025, eighty years after the bomb, together with the bell that survived.
