Sakitsu Village: The Altar Went Where the Stepping Was

Deus, god of good catches

Christianity reached Sakitsu early. The Portuguese missionary Luís de Almeida preached here in 1569. In 1614, the Tokugawa shogunate banned the faith across Japan. In 1637–38 came the Shimabara–Amakusa Uprising, a rebellion of hungry, overtaxed peasants, many of them Christian, which ended in a massacre. After that, Amakusa was watched closely. Every household had to be registered with a Buddhist temple. People were made to step on a fumie, a picture of Christ or the Virgin Mary, often cast in metal, to show that they were not Christians.

Sakitsu kept the faith anyway, without priests. Believers were organised into small groups, with religious leaders known as mizukata, who carried out baptisms and funerals and kept the calendar of feast days. Medals, crosses, shells and mirrors were among the objects kept at a mizukata’s house.

Stone steps lead up from the village to Sakitsu Suwa Shrine. It was founded in 1647 to pray for good catches and safe voyages. The villagers were its parishioners, Christians included.

A very large misunderstanding

The investigation began with cattle. At the end of 1803, two cows were slaughtered in the area, in a country where beef was not generally eaten. When believers were questioned, they explained that meat was used in their rituals. After nearly two centuries of discretion, it was the beef that gave them away.

In 1805, 5,205 people in four villages were identified as followers of a forbidden faith. In Sakitsu, it was 1,709 out of 2,401, or about seven in ten. They were told to hand in their devotional objects. The place chosen for this was Sakitsu Suwa Shrine.

The verdict came the following year. The shogunate chose not to treat them as Christians. They had simply misunderstood their religion, it decided. With seven in ten villagers involved, it was a very large misunderstanding.

The pardon came with conditions. Each person had to step on a fumie once more, then put their seal to an oath renouncing the faith.

Officially, it had all been a misunderstanding.

During the ban, Sakitsu’s regular fumie took place at the house of the village headmen, the Yoshida family.

The altar on the spot

After the ban was lifted, Sakitsu’s Catholics built their first church in 1888. It was made of wood and stood just below the shrine, on land that had belonged to the mizukata.

In 1934, the church moved. A French priest, Father Augustin Halbout, bought the old Yoshida property. He wanted a church that stood for resurrection on the place where the faithful had been made to step. Tetsukawa Yosuke, who had finished the church at Ōe the year before, built it in Gothic style, with a concrete front, a spire and a wooden hall behind.

I had never taken my shoes off to go to church before. Inside, the floor is tatami, as it has been since the church was built. From the street it is a Gothic church; from within it feels like a Japanese room that has been given a church to live in. Photography is not allowed inside, but Amakusa City’s page on the church has an official photo.

The altar was placed on the spot where the stepping had been done.

Ōe’s church stands on a hill above its village. Sakitsu’s is known as the Church of the Sea, and sits among the houses, a few steps from the water.

Evidence, on display

Near the church, an inn built in 1936 has been turned into a small museum, Sakitsu Museum Minato-ya. The curtain over its door sums up the local method in six pictures: a fish, a mallet, a round mirror, a cross, a rosary and an old coin.

The fish and the mallet are what Ebisu and Daikoku usually carry. Mirrors and coins were among the objects handed over across Amakusa in 1805. Half the pictures on the curtain belong to Japanese gods of good fortune, which was rather the point.

Both, all year

Outside, it was still raining. In one garden, a statue of Mary stood on the rocks above a pond, while a koi went about its business underneath.