Urakami Cathedral

Why Go

A parish that built its church twice

Urakami is where the Nagasaki story stops being about missionaries and becomes about a community. These were the people who walked into Ōura in 1865. What happened to them next was not freedom. Understanding Urakami means holding three things in sequence: a village that kept its faith without clergy, a village that was broken up and deported for saying so, and a village that came back, built the largest Catholic church in the region, and then lost it and its people in a single morning. The building you see is the second one. The parish is continuous.

Concealment, exile, construction, destruction, return

Urakami was a farming village north of Nagasaki whose people had kept a Christian identity through the whole period of the prohibition, organized among themselves and outwardly registered with Buddhist temples. In 1865 a group of them went to the newly opened church at Ōura and made themselves known to Father Bernard Petitjean.

Saying so publicly had consequences. In 1867 the villagers informed their headman that they would bury their dead as Catholics, and sixty-eight people were arrested and tortured. The Meiji government kept the ban in force. More than three thousand people from Urakami were deported to domains across Japan, and many died in exile. The edict boards prohibiting Christianity were removed in 1873, largely because the persecution was damaging Japan's relations with foreign powers, and the survivors returned to a village that had been emptied.

They built a small church in 1879 and began the brick cathedral in 1895. It took thirty years. The towers were finished in 1925, and the result was the largest Catholic church in the region.

On the morning of August 9, 1945 the atomic bomb detonated a short distance away. The cathedral was destroyed and a great many of the parish were killed. Whether to rebuild on the ruin or keep it as a memorial was argued over for years. The parish rebuilt, and the new cathedral was completed in 1959. It was refaced in brick tile in 1980 so that it would look more like the building that had been lost. Damaged stone figures and pieces of the original wall stand in the grounds, and a section of the ruined south wall was moved to what is now Peace Park.

The present cathedral is a reinforced building of 1959 given a brick-tile face in 1980, with twin towers, a rose window, and round-arched openings that follow the lines of the destroyed church. The effect is deliberate: this is a reconstruction that wants to be recognized as one. Read the fabric in two registers. The building is post-war. The weathered stone saints along the approach, the fragments of brick wall, and the marks on them are from before 1945.