The Hidden Christians of Japan Come Forward

The edicts that proscribed Christianity in Japan (see the ban of 1614) were still posted in the 1860s; the French missionary Bernard Petitjean later called them three centuries old (Petitjean, in Marnas, vol. 2, pp. 265–266, circular of 6 May 1873). At Nagasaki he and his colleagues built a church dedicated to the twenty-six martyrs. It was blessed on 19 February 1865, with the commanders of the European warships in the harbour attending, while the Japanese crowd, Francisque Marnas writes, held back (Petitjean, in Marnas, vol. 1, pp. 482–483).

Marnas tells what happened next from two letters of Petitjean. About half past twelve on Friday 17 March 1865, twelve or fifteen men, women and children stood at the church door. Petitjean let them in and knelt before the altar. Three women of fifty or sixty knelt beside him, and one said in a low voice, her hand on her breast, that the heart of all of them was the same as his. They were from Urakami, she said, where nearly everyone had the same heart, and she asked where the image of Santa Maria was. They told him that they kept the birth of Jesus on the twenty-fifth day of the eleventh month and were now in the season of sorrow, which he understood to be Lent (Petitjean, in Marnas, vol. 1, pp. 487–489).

For the following days Marnas quotes the journal that Petitjean sent to Paris in his letters. It records crowds of visitors and Japanese officers watching the church; he and his colleague kept apart and told the Christians to come in smaller numbers, for fear of exposing them (Petitjean, in Marnas, vol. 1, pp. 492–494). On 23 March a man named Paolo told them that Urakami had never been without Christians and that baptism had always been given there: when a child was born, a neighbour who knew how poured water on its head with the sign of the cross, gave it a name and said prayers (Petitjean, in Marnas, vol. 1, pp. 495–496).

The government answered with deportation. A decree of the emperor’s council, sent to Washington in translation in July 1868, says that the Christian religion is strictly prohibited by the law of the empire and that the people of Urakami are to be placed in the charge of the daimyos, urged to renounce “their evil ways” and put to labour (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1868, part 1, document 349, enclosure 4). In January 1870 the Japanese foreign ministers told the American envoy that the Christians still at Urakami would be distributed in the same way, and the consuls at Nagasaki protested (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1870, document 282, enclosures 2 and 3). The Nagasaki authorities reported 2,810 people sent to eighteen places, with 185 more to follow by sea; the eighteen figures as printed add up to 2,631 (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1870, document 284).

Petitjean, by then bishop and vicar apostolic, wrote in May 1873 that the government had ordered the edicts taken down toward the end of February and the prisoners freed toward the end of March. It was not yet religious liberty, he added, nor even official toleration (Petitjean, in Marnas, vol. 2, pp. 265–266, circular of 6 May 1873). The government’s notification, as Marnas prints it, orders the boards of the standing edicts withdrawn because the people know them fully (Petitjean, in Marnas, vol. 2, p. 265, note 1 (the notification as Marnas prints it)). By the count Petitjean drew up at Nagasaki, which Marnas calls incomplete, 3,404 people had been deported from Urakami, 660 had died and 1,981 had come home (Petitjean, in Marnas, vol. 2, p. 270).