Places where the tabi is remembered
In July 1868 the first 114 leaders of the Christians were sent away: 66 to Hagi, 28 to and the rest to Fukuyama.In the general deportation that followed, more than 3,000 people were scattered over some twenty domains.The people of Urakami called the exile simply the , the journey. Today, in several of the castle towns that received them, local Catholics keep the places where they suffered.
Hagi (Chōshū domain). About 300 Urakami Christians were sent to Hagi, and more than forty of them died there from torture and hunger.They were held in the former Iwakuni yashiki, the residence of the Iwakuni branch of the Mōri, inside the third enclosure of Hagi Castle. A priest, Fr Villion,obtained the site for the Hagi church as a Christian cemetery; the Laudate guide records that he did so through Itō Hirobumi and Inoue Kaoru, both men of Chōshū, with the help of the prefectural governor (Unverified).He gathered the garden stones on which the exiles had been made to sit naked in the cold (Tradition), and built on them a monument inscribed "Before the Lord God, the faithful who died for their faith".Twenty of the exiles are buried around it.In 1994 the Hagi parish restored the cemetery and named it the Hagi Martyrs Memorial Park.The same ground honors an older witness: Blessed Melchior Kumagai Motonao, a senior retainer of the Mōri, killed at his Hagi residence on August 16, 1605, and beatified in 2008 among the ; the memorial to him in the church cemetery was also raised by Fr Villion.Beside it stands a memorial to his son-in-law Amano Motonobu, whose stone names him Peter.
Fukuyama (Fukuyama domain). According to the Catholic parish of Fukuyama, twenty Christians came to Fukuyama in the first exile (Disputed), and in the second came seventy-six more, among them Isabelina Yuri, the woman who had told Fr at , "All of us here have the same heart as you": ninety-six in all.The parish and a local study group on the Urakami exiles in Fukuyama have traced four exile sites in the castle town and lead a walking pilgrimage of about four kilometres between them, praying the rosary.
Wakayama (Kii domain). , aged thirty, was sent to Wakayama with her four daughters. She remembered being searched and put in a stable, where her rosary and her picture of Mary were taken; fever spread and about nine people died.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Disputed: date of the Hagi monument, 1891 (Meiji 24; tourism texts)or February 1889 (Hagi Catholic Church).
- Disputed: Fukuyama first-exile number, 20 (Fukuyama parish; Archdiocese)or 29 (Urakami parish history).
- Unverified: Itō and Inoue's role, from a single source.