Added: 12/31/2005 |
Oura and other Christian Churches in NagasakiIn 1542, the first Portuguese ship arrived in Nagasaki Harbor, and in 1571, the Japanese government opened the port of Nagasaki to the foreign trade that remained Japan's only connection with the outside world for more than two hundred years. Foreigners brought with them not only European goods and food, but the European culture and religion traditions as well, and the Christian community in Nagasaki was formed in 1550, eight years after the first European ship entered Nagasaki Harbor.
The Nagasaki Christian Community is legendary in the history of Japanese Christianity due to its somewhat veiled existence for more than two centuries of persecutions, conducted by the Imperial Japanese government, including mass crucifixions of faithful Christians, who refused to give up the faith.
The Urakami Cathedral was the largest and the oldest Christian church in the Orient. The history of Urakami Cathedral is the story of Urakami exiled Christians. In the period from 1868 to 1911, the new Meiji Government tried to strengthen its religious authority. It explained to common people that the emperor was a descendant of the sun-goddess and consequently separated Shintoism from Buddhism, maintaining the decree with the monks' exclusion from Shinto shrines and destroying or burning down the statues of Buddha and sutras.
Nevertheless, the Christians in Urakami, Nagasaki, were the most dreadful enemies for the government. The number of them was continuously increasing and the government finally decided to exile all the Christians. From June, 1868, to December, 1869, the government sent more than three thousand and one hundred Christians to Tsuwano, Hagi, Fukuyama and other twenty places in the western Japan. About eighteen percent of all the exiled Christians died. The rest were released only in March, 1873. The Urakami Cathedral was destroyed along with many other buildings on August 9, 1945 after the bomb explosion. The city was rebuilt after the war and new churches were, since Christianity never left the souls of Nagasaki inhabitants.
A famous Church and today's designated national treasure of Japan is the Oura Catholic Church that thrived after the bombing. The Oura Catholic Church is Japan's oldest Gothic church, built for the foreign community in 1864 under the supervision of a French missionary, Petit Jean. The Oura Catholic Church is closely connected with the history of Japan's Christians, who were persecuted. In particular, the church commemorates the martyrdom in 1597 of twenty six Christians - twenty Japanese and six foreigners - who were crucified in Nagasaki on the orders of Hideyoshi Toyotomi, Japan's military ruler at the time.
Latin Divinity School was designated as the National Important Cultural Asset in May 15, 1872.
When the national ban on Christianity was finally lifted in 1873 and the exiled Urakami Christians returned to Nagasaki, Fr. Petitjean, a rector of Oura Church, began the construction of this divinity school, which is one of the first wooden structure brick buildings in Japan, completed in 1875. Since 1926, the school served as a rectory and a meeting hall.
The history of Japanese Christianity is, in fact, the history of bans and persecutions that lasted
for centuries until 1873. Despite the fact that to be a Christian was a capital crime in Japan for two hundred years, Nagasaki Christianity survived and finally flourished.
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