Initially they were treated so well that it felt almost eerie. One of the exiles, Kanzaburō, recorded in his notes:
Our lodgings at the temple were surrounded by a bamboo fence. Tatami mats cover the floor of the great room, there is a hibachi brazier, and the cook was extremely polite and greeted us by saying, “I look forward to serving you.”
The quality of the food was also good for prisoner fare. Even the rice was served in small individual wood containers. This was all part of the strategy of the authorities, probably a manifestation of their desire to “persuade through the use of reason.”
Despite the favorable treatment, however, the peasants of Urakami had absolutely no intention of abandoning their Kirishitan faith.
This isn’t going to continue forever, Itō Seizaemon, in his role as their guard, chuckled to himself at the magnanimous treatment. It won’t be long before we see just how stubborn the Kuros of Urakami really are. One day soon things will get rough.
The Tsuwano authorities paid them no heed for about a month, but eventually the officers began their attempts at persuasion. Even a Shinto priest was brought in to assist.
It seemed to the Kirishitans that they were endlessly asked the same questions they had been asked at the Nagasaki government office and harangued with sermons of the same gist as before. But the twenty-eight Kirishitans by now were veterans at refuting the lectures and throwing the questions back at their interrogators.
The officers based their admonitions to apostasy in the logic of National Learning3 and Confucianism, but not one of the prisoners was swayed by this approach.
The green of the Tsuwano mountain range gradually began to change into autumnal colors. The mornings and evenings became increasingly chilly.
“Right about now, they should be starting to harvest the rice,” Seikichi mumbled, and everyone listened wordlessly to his comment. The faces of the relatives they had left behind floated before each individual pair of eyes.
The manner in which they were treated changed overnight. The officials switched to the mode of persuasion preferred by Itō Seizaemon.
One morning, just as the prisoners were finishing breakfast, Itō Seizaemon suddenly appeared, and with a thin smile on his lips said, “Everyone listen carefully. It’s been decided that I will return to Nagasaki, so you won’t be seeing me for a while. Every single day I’ve been waiting patiently here in Tsuwano for you men to change your minds, but since you continue to be headstrong, even I can’t protect you from the officials here any longer.”
The men listened quietly, but none of them believed that he had been protecting them from the rulers of Tsuwano.
“Once I’m gone, things are going to get rough for you. Soon you’ll be tortured. Take my advice: you’d better hurry and have a change of heart….” With a smirk and those parting words of counsel, Itō departed.
“What a pest! Him and his snooty sermons!” the men mocked.
“Yeah, but somehow when I see him I feel sorry for him. Why would that be?”
All the men shared Seikichi’s opinion. Spineless and cowardly though he was, and though he strutted about acting like some important administrator, Itō was still somehow laughable, and they couldn’t bring themselves to despise him.
But there was nothing untrue in his words.
Two days later, several men swarmed into the temple, and without a word they began removing the tatami mats from the main building.
“What are you doing?” When Sen’emon, the presumed leader of the men, asked in surprise, one man responded, “We’re under orders from Lord Kanamori. Starting tonight, you won’t be using any bedding. You’re to sleep on these thin little woven rugs.” He pointed at a stack of straw rugs they had brought.
After their tatami mats were removed and their original bedding was carted away, the five cups of rice they had been receiving each day were reduced to two. Their soup became water with a little salt and no trace of even a vegetable leaf. The treatment they had received up to this point was completely overturned.
The interrogations, which until now had been gentle, suddenly turned fierce. If they talked back, they were beaten mercilessly. And they were beaten if they remained silent.
During the interrogations, two of the three attending officers employed violence and one showed sympathy. Once the two officers had finished punching and kicking the prisoners, the third would offer tender words of comfort. “Listen, we don’t want to have to do this to you. If you’ll just give up your heresies, we’ll have them release you from this temple, and we’ll even give you money to return home.” At other times, he would prey on their longing for their families in their attempts to sway them: “Wouldn’t you like to see your mothers and your wives back home? You can’t imagine how they worry about you. It’s time to stop shirking your duty to your parents.”
The captives could still endure the pummeling and the kicking. And they labored to turn a deaf ear to all the appealing enticements. But the steadily increasing cold of late autumn and the hunger they suffered began to weaken the bodies of these twenty-eight prisoners.
When they were punched and kicked, they mustered their courage by feeling anger at the unjust treatment. Or they put up with it knowing that if they endured it for only a time, the brutality would eventually have to end.
But starvation was not a temporary condition. Hunger continued day after day, like a rainy season with no letup, and it took its toll on their bodies. Some staggered when they stood up, others often felt dizzy.
“Look how thin my cheeks have gotten! I’ve turned into quite a handsome fellow!” Initially Seikichi and the others showed their faces to one another and chuckled feebly, but they began to realize that it wasn’t just their cheeks that had dropped flesh; their arms and thighs were also progressively wasting away. As they grew even thinner, their skin turned opaque and rough, as though sprinkled with flour. Before long, their bellies began to swell abnormally. They were beginning to show signs of malnutrition.
In addition—
In addition, no matter what the activity—even shifting their bodies slightly—all movement became a torment. The listless desire to lie down, unalleviated feelings of exhaustion, as though their bodies were encased in lead—these feelings continued throughout each day. If there was anything they thought about, it was eating.
They tried to chew the meager daily ration of rice for as long a period of time as possible and then swallow it with their spittle. That was Sen’emon’s suggestion. But an unbearable hunger seized them in the middle of the night, which they could only put at bay by drinking some of the water they had put aside.
“Do you think the men who were taken to other places are going through the same kinds of struggles that we are?”
The 113 men exiled from Urakami had been dispersed to Tsuwano and also to Hagi and Fukuyama. They had no way to find out the fate of those who had been shipped off to the other two locations.
Soon they no longer had the strength even to think. Young Seikichi initially thought about Kiku from time to time, but soon it became like a dream and lost all sense of reality. He couldn’t imagine any reason why a woman would continue to have feelings for an outcast such as him.
I imagine . . . I imagine even she has forgotten all about me by now….
He felt neither regret nor sorrow. It seemed perfectly natural; in any case, he was suffering far more because of starvation than because of her.
“Sen’emon, we can’t bear this anymore. Please talk to the officers!”
Surrendering to the entreaties of the other men, Sen’emon pleaded frantically with one of the officers. “If this goes on much longer, we’ll all die!”
The officer curled up his lip. “Why are you worrying about your lives? I thought you believed that this life means nothing to you!” he mockingly responded. “And don’t you claim your Deus or whoever he is will give you anything you want? Why don’t you ask your Deus for help? Tell him you’d like more to eat!”
Th
is officer assumed they would eventually admit defeat.
These men from Nagasaki were unfamiliar with the winters in the San’in region in northwestern Honshu. They were ignorant of the depths that the snows can reach in Tsuwano. The officials speculated that the prisoners would be unable to endure the freezing winter on top of their hunger and before long would cave in.
It unfolded just as they had thought it would—
Winter crept up on the prisoners. Autumn, with its bright colors ablaze on the hills surrounding the village, fled at a gallop, and Mount Aono and Mount Shiroyama grew desolate. Nights became intolerably cold.
The men had no bedding. It had all been taken from them. All they had been given in its place was a single thin straw rug each. It would be impossible to tolerate the cold with only that one little rug.
They decided to sleep in groups of two, clinging to each other beneath a pair of the rugs. Their hope was that they could warm each other with their body heat. They no longer cared anything about awkwardness or appearances.
Still, by the middle of the night, it grew too cold to sleep. Wrapped in each other’s arms, they were somehow able to keep their abdomens warm, thanks to their body heat, but the chill wind on their backs was unbearable.
Next they tried sleeping back to back. Then their abdomens became cold as ice. In the darkness they coughed, turned over repeatedly on the floor, dozed off from time to time, and waited for the dawn to break.
“Let’s say an oraçiõ!” Trying to hearten the men who seemed on the brink of breaking, Sen’emon began to pray aloud and bid the others to join in chorus. The voices of the men united in prayer in the darkness sounded almost like groans.
“What is wrong with this Deus of yours?” From time to time an officer would stop by to taunt them. “What has he done for you? Do you still believe in your Deus who won’t even give you a mattress?”
Such words had a more powerful effect on these starved, semiconscious prisoners than the enticements of Satan.
Why do we have to go through all this? Surely Lord Jezusu and Santa Maria know how much we’re suffering. But they do nothing to help us. Occasionally such thoughts flickered through their minds.
One night, the cold was painful beyond words. They could tell it was snowing outside. In the dark they heard a man weeping.
“What are you blubbering about?!” Sen’emon asked with deliberate harshness. “Lord Jezusu endured even more pain as he carried his cross!”
The rest of the men listened in silence to the tongue-lashing. But every one of them felt alone. They had to battle starvation and cold on their own.
At dawn they had their first glimpse of what the snows in Tsuwano were actually like. Snow had never piled up this much in Nagasaki or Urakami. The snow had quit falling, but there were mountains of snow everywhere, everything was white, and the cold was intense.
“No food this morning. Just an interrogation,” a prison guard dressed in a straw coat called out from amid the snow.
What could they possibly still have to ask us?
But they could not disobey an order. As they formed a row and walked down the hallway to a back room of the vacant temple where other officers were just waking up, they appeared to every eye like a procession of ghosts.
They were ordered to sit on the icy wooden floor at the front of the room. A hibachi with red coals smoldering inside had been placed in the room, and there three officers seemed to relish the warm breakfast they were eating.
The scent of steaming miso soup, and the sound of pickled radishes being chewed. Forcing the starving Kirishitans to smell and hear these things was inhuman torture. Even if they lowered their eyes and tried not to look, the sound of hot tea being slurped and the smell of the soup mercilessly provoked their empty stomachs. They wanted to scream.
An elderly official sipped his tea and asked, “You’d like some of this? Of course you would! We aren’t devils, you know. Seeing you so skinny and shaking, naturally we’re moved to compassion. We’d like to give you something to eat. We wish we could offer you some winter clothing. But we have orders from our leaders that we can’t show you any form of mercy until you reject the heathen teachings…. We’ll have to continue the cruel treatment.” His voice sounded almost bewildered. “Stop being so endlessly stubborn and making things difficult for us. All you have to say is ‘I’ve had a change of heart’ . . . and, look here, we’ll give you all the warm rice you can eat. We’ll move you to another temple right away and give you warm bedding to sleep in.”
He set down his teacup and looked around at the men with steely eyes. “I understand…. None of you who’d like to have this over with can say the words while you’re all here together. We’ll have you come one by one into the next room, and you can whisper to me whether you will continue in your beliefs or reject them. Those who recant will be given food in a separate room so none of the others knows. But those who remain adamant will be taken back to their cells.”
He got to his feet, opened the sliding door to the next room, and vanished within.
Their names were called one by one. One by one, they went into the neighboring room. The man asking the question and the man answering spoke in low voices so that no one would know how anybody responded.
I will keep my faith. After each man made this declaration, he returned on wobbly legs to the wretched room where they were held prisoner. Those who had already completed the ritual and returned to the cell rubbed their hands together and flashed each man who rejoined them a sad smile.
They returned, one, then another, then yet another. But of the twenty-eight, eight did not come back. Those eight had apostatized.
“Dammit!” Seikichi shouted angrily. Even he didn’t know who he was angry with. Was it with the eight who had apostatized? Was it with the officers whose methods were so heartless? Was it with some invisible power? Or was it with God, who said nothing . . . ?
1. Iwakuni Castle, which is included in the “top 100” castles of Japan.
2. Nishi Amane (1829–1897) studied at the University of Leiden and, after returning to Japan, introduced such Western philosophies as utilitarianism and empiricism. He also published an encyclopedia, headed the Tokyo Academy, and was a member of the House of Peers. Mori Ōgai (1862–1922) was one of the great titans of Meiji literature. He studied medical hygiene in Germany; served as surgeon general of the Japanese army; and, in a separate career, translated many European and Scandinavian novels, poems, and plays, and produced his own original works, one of the most famous being Gan (The Wild Goose, 1911–1913; trans. 1995).
3. Kokugaku (National Learning) was a philosophical and scholarly reaction against the prevailing intellectual and political preoccupation with Chinese Confucian and Buddhist texts. Some scholars in the mid-nineteenth century turned their attention instead to the earliest Japanese classics—the Kojiki and Nihon shoki (early-eighth-century collections of native myths) and the first great poetry anthology, the Man’yōshū (late eighth century)—in a quest for a “purer” Japaneseness that predated Chinese influence.
MARUYAMA
WHILE THE PRISONERS groaned from cold and starvation in Tsuwano …
In the ninth month of the preceding year, the new Meiji era was ushered in. Kyoto, which had been the capital city for many long years, was replaced by Edo, whose name was changed to Tokyo. A series of reforms in domestic administration was carried out, their radical nature creating chaos in various parts of the country and spawning several acts of terrorism.
On Christmas in the second year of Meiji—Christmas was observed at the Ōura Church according to the solar calendar for the foreign residents1—women and children who had walked all the way from Urakami participated in the Mass.
By now everyone in Nagasaki knew that these women were Kuros. They made no attempt to conceal the fact that they were Kirishitans. These wives and sisters of men who had been sentenced to exile formed a procession, as though they hoped to be arrested themselves, and paraded along the Togi
tsu Highway toward Nagasaki, following the shoreline until they reached the Ōura Church.
In the Christmas Mass, Petitjean looked into the faces of these women whose eyes were fixed on him and spoke:
“You are suffering much.”
The faces of women burnished by the sweat of daylong labor. The faces of women who had borne babies, nurtured children, and toiled alongside their husbands. The faces of women who, having their husbands torn from them, had nowhere but here to turn for relief.
“I’m sure you question why the Lord has granted you such trials. But please consider carefully. Without suffering, one individual can never be fully connected to another. Think of those times when your children have fallen ill. I’m sure that you and your husbands grieved and worried together and cared for that child through the night together. No doubt it was in such times that your heart and the heart of your husband were joined as one. Do you see? Suffering links people to one another. I believe that your present pain has caused you to love your husbands more than ever before. And I am certain that your husbands in faraway Tsuwano or Hagi think about you each and every day. Suffering has thus bound you as a couple together powerfully, tightly.”
Tears in their eyes, the women nodded at Petitjean’s words.
“I assure you that none of you is alone. That Man is always at your side. Because he, too, suffered terrible pains, he knows more than anyone your current suffering and pain. I myself … yesterday I visited with M. Outrey of France and Mr. Parkes of England, and we joined hands and promised that we would continue our petitions to the Japanese government.”
When he finished his sermon, Petitjean returned to the altar and resumed the Mass. The flames from the candles on the altar flickered like the wings of moths. Eventually the women began singing a hymn in voices of lamentation.
Ah, this spring, this spring!
The blossoms of the cherry shall fall.
Again next spring,
The same flowers will open their buds.