Letters and Journal of Bernard Petitjean
The letters of the French missionary who met the hidden Christians of Urakami at Nagasaki in March 1865, as printed from the archives of the Paris Foreign Missions by Francisque Marnas in 1896. Some are quoted word for word; others Marnas retells.
Petitjean reported the meeting of 17 March 1865 in two letters, one of 18 March to his superior in Japan and one of 22 March to the directors of the seminary of the Foreign Missions in Paris. Marnas, a priest who wrote the history of the mission thirty years later, says that he drew his account of that day from these two letters. He tells it in his own words and gives the dialogue in quotation marks. For the days that followed he prints, as quotation, the letters in the form of a journal that Petitjean sent to Paris, and notes that the journal itself was burnt at Yokohama in 1874. In the second volume he prints Petitjean’s letters of 1873 on the removal of the edicts and the return of the exiles, and a table of the deported that Petitjean drew up.
The reader therefore has Petitjean’s words in part directly and in part through Marnas, and the wiki says which. Both men write as missionaries; the Japanese authorities appear in these pages as persecutors. For the government’s own statements see Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs of the United States, 1868 and 1870: Japan.
Cited in
- 17 March 1865, firm date