A white-bait fishing trip
Some time after 1614, when the Christian churches of were closed, two men from Urakami went fishing for white-bait at the weir on the Urakami river.One was Magoemon, who had been the doorkeeper and cook at the village church of Santa Clara until it was shut, and who now lived in Nakano, where 's little house stands today. The other was his friend Shichirōzaemon from Oka.
Magoemon had asked his friend along for a reason he could not bring himself to say. Since the ban, neighbours who knew perfectly well that they had all been Christian no longer dared ask one another whether they still were. "At this rate," he worried, "the Christians will die out." For two or three days at the weir the words would not come. When at last he spoke, Shichirōzaemon threw up both hands in agreement; he had been waiting to say the same thing.
Urakami today is a district of Nagasaki city, with a rebuilt cathedral on the Takaya ground. Everything since Magoemon's fishing trip comes back to this: a community that kept a secret together, paid for it together, and came home to build on the very place where it had been tested.
Church land
The name Urakami means "above the bay": the inlet of Nagasaki harbour once reached deep inland, and the farming country at its head was "the land above the bay."Christianity reached Nagasaki around 1567, and Urakami soon after. In 1584 the lord gave Urakami to the Society of Jesus as a fief, in thanks for his victory at Okitanawate. From then, the parish history says, it was a Christian village "in name and in fact."
When expelled the missionaries in 1587, Urakami became, like Nagasaki, land under the ruler's direct control, and it stayed so under the Tokugawa.In 1603 a fine church was built at Santa Clara with the alms of Portuguese and Japanese Christians, with a resident priest.
In 1605 a headman was appointed for the village, now called Urakami Yamazato. He was Kikuchi Masashige, a masterless samurai from Higo, whose house stood at , the rise where the cathedral stands today. He took the name Takaya, and his family ruled Urakami's Christians until the end of the shogunate.Yamazato had five hamlets: Magome, Sato, Nakano, Motohara and Ieno. Apart from Magome, the parish history says, every farming family in the four was Christian.
How the secret was kept
An organisation. Magoemon and Shichirōzaemon's network had three offices. A single for Urakami kept the calendar of feasts, called the hiyori or "'s calendar," and handed down prayers and teaching. A in each hamlet passed these on and baptised. A kikiyaku in each smaller district knew every household and carried the word to each person.Magoemon was the first chōkata. The office was elective, but his descendants were chosen for seven generations.
A mask. Every family belonged to the Pure Land temple Shōtokuji. When someone died, the priest came to chant. In the next room the Christians recited a prayer "to undo the sutra"; the body was laid in the coffin facing away from the priest; and when he had gone, they opened the coffin and removed the Buddhist objects.Graves kept the old Christian shape but lost their crosses; later, when that too drew questions, families used plain field stones, noishi, which needed no Buddhist name.
Feast days in disguise. The feast of Santa Clara fell near the Bon festival in the old calendar, so each summer the villagers gathered at the site of their lost church and prayed under cover of the Bon dance.
A face they could not refuse to tread on. From 1641 the village was made to tread on the each New Year, at the headman's house. Before and after, they prayed the , the prayer of contrition.
Four crackdowns
The village was not always lucky.
In 1790 the headman, Takaya Eizaemon, accused nineteen villagers of Christianity after many refused to give money for 88 stone Buddhas he planned for a temple. The arrests were led by an official the headman had bribed. There was no proof; plans to dig up graves for Christian objects, or to plant a foreign image from Amakusa, came to nothing, and the case dragged on until 1795.In 1839 (or 1842: ) the chōkata Rigorō and other leaders were arrested and then released, for reasons the official records do not explain.In 1856 the chōkata Kichizō and most of the leaders were imprisoned and tortured. Kichizō died in prison, his son was banished, and of the four baptisers only Domingo survived.Among Kichizō's possessions the magistrate's officers listed "a white porcelain standing Buddha called ," that is, Santa Maria.
After Kichizō, no chōkata was appointed. Nine years later the village found priests again.
Found, and taken away
On a group from Urakami, among them the midwife Isabelina , walked into the new French church at and told Father , "Our hearts are the same as yours."Within days half the village was visiting; within two years it had .
Then came the break. In April 1867 the villagers refused temple funerals and asked to leave Shōtokuji; on 15 July 1867 (13 July in one prefectural source: ) the four chapels were raided.In 1868 the new Meiji government sent 114 leaders into exile, and in January 1870 it sent the rest: 3,394 people to twenty-odd domains across western Japan. Urakami became an empty village.
Its people called the exile , the journey. When the ban was lifted in 1873, about 1,900 came home, by the parish count, and that September 736 of them had no house at all.Some 613 had died in exile, by the Japan Tourism Agency's figure; other counts differ ().
The church on the headman's ground
The returnees were desperately poor. In July 1874 dysentery broke out on Iōjima outside the harbour and spread to Urakami, and smallpox followed. The French priest nursed the sick, helped by young people just back from exile, among them Iwanaga Maki, who went on to found the community later called the Urakami Jūjikai, which raised orphans.
In 1880 the Takaya headman's family, its power gone with the old order, sold its estate. On 4 June the Urakami Catholics bought it for 1,600 yen, and on 15 August they said their first Mass in the old house, where they had trodden on the .The next year they raised a cross on a nearby hill, Jūjiyama, in reparation for the treading and in thanks that the persecution was over.
On that ground Father Pierre Fraineau began a brick cathedral in 1895, collecting coins from house to house. He died in 1911; it was dedicated on 18 March 1915 by the parish's date (Urakawa, writing in 1928, gives 17 March 1914: Disputed), and its twin towers were finished in 1925.In front of it stood a , where, the parish says, the ancestors had been tied and questioned, and beside it the headman's stone water basin.
11:02 a.m.
At 11:02 a.m. on 9 August 1945 an exploded about 500 metres above Matsuyama-machi in Urakami.In the cathedral, priests were hearing confessions before the Feast of the Assumption; both priests and the people inside were killed.Of about 12,000 Catholics in Urakami, Archbishop Nakamura said in 2025, about 8,500 died.
On 23 November 1945, about 600 surviving parishioners gathered in front of the ruins for a requiem. When the exiles came home in 1873, Bishop Urakawa told them, there were at least ruined houses in Urakami; now there was not one.At Christmas 1945 the cathedral's bell, dug from the rubble almost undamaged, rang again from a frame of three logs.
