Kiku's Prayer Part 39

"What do you mean by ... 'some excessive coercion'?" Kusumoto and Kat displayed prearranged suspicion on their faces.

"We of the Tsuwano domain aren't the only ones who've been charged with caring for and persuading these prisoners. They've also been interrogated by a man from the Nishi Bureau in Nagasaki," the officer said, as though he were reciting a memorized speech. With this response, the Tsuwano domain was released from any fear that the central government might reprimand or hold them responsible for abusive treatment of the Kiris.h.i.tans.

"Are you saying that in the unlikely scenario that excessive force was used, it was done by someone from the Nishi Bureau in Nagasaki?" Kat asked with a fierce expression, but the officers stared at the ground and said nothing further. Their silence was meant to be interpreted as an affirmative answer to the question.

"What is the man's name?"

"Sir ... It's Lord It. It Seizaemon."

Two weeks later, It received notice that he was being dismissed from his position at the Nishi Bureau in Nagasaki.

"Lord It, all of this ..." Glancing up intermittently to check It's reaction and looking very sympathetic, It's superior, Noguchi, muttered, "... all of this is on orders from Lord Sawa.... We don't understand it at all.... Evidently they feel it was wrong for you to have interrogated the Kuros in Tsuwano so roughly. The foreigners heard about it, and so Lord Sawa, as foreign minister, probably had no choice but to take these measures."

His face crimson with anger, It shouted, "This is unfair! From the very beginning, wasn't it on orders from the higher-ups that I interrogated them harshly? And it wasn't ... I wasn't the only one who was hard on them. The officers in Tsuwano did even worse things than I did, throwing them in the icy water and shoving them in that three-foot cell!"

"Clearly." Noguchi hurriedly nodded his head. He was in the habit of saying "Clearly" in place of "I understand."

"So it's completely unfair that I'm the only one being punished, don't you think?!"

"Clearly. But this is what our superiors have decided, so petty little bureaucrats like us can't do anything about it. For now, just be patient and we'll come up with something." "We'll come up with something" was another of Noguchi's stock phrases.

"And just what will you 'come up with'?! d.a.m.n it all!!" It was frustrated to the point of tears.

Somewhat unpromisingly, Noguchi replied, "What I mean by 'come up with something' ... is that I plan to ask Lord Hond Shuntar if he would intercede with Lord Sawa and ask for some leniency."

"Hond?" Yet again It was forced to acknowledge, with frustration and envy, the enormous gap between his life and that of Hond. But at this point he had no options other than rely on Hond, even if it meant having to treat him obsequiously. "Lord Hond, is it? Well, please do what you can."

"Clearly. We'll come up with something."

A misty rain fell in Nagasaki throughout the day. As he watched the rain, It reflected that there are distinct categories of people in the world: the strong and the weak, the fortunate and the unfortunate, the glamorous and the wretched. While he cursed his own ill fortune, he hung his head as he thought of how Kiku had desecrated her own body by believing in his deceptions.

I couldn't help it ... Those were the first words It had muttered to an ephemeral vision of Kiku. Can you forgive me?

Still, he knew full well that his own weaknesses would drive him back into the same sort of behavior, perhaps even as early as tomorrow.

Hond received the letter that a kindly Noguchi had sent him on behalf of It Seizaemon.

"He's no end of trouble, that It ...," he said, showing the letter to Oy, who was now his wife.

Their home in Aoyama was circled by thick groves of trees and bamboo. At her husband's behest, Oy was regularly visiting the home of a British family in Kji-machi, where she took lessons in English conversation and European cooking from the lady of the house. In Hond's view, the wife of an up-and-coming high-ranking government official had to be able to speak English and be skilled in Western table manners.

"What are you going to do about this?" Oy asked.

"Nothing. When it comes right down to it, the man is just not the lucky sort. No matter how hard you try to help someone that ill fated, it's the same as pouring water into a bottomless bucket. But, Oy, more important than that ... you're still speaking in the Nagasaki dialect," he cautioned her. He was perpetually admonishing her that the wife of a high-ranking official must not speak in a provincial dialect. "I'm a busy man. It's too late for me to be worrying about someone like It." With that, he shifted his eyes back to the Western book he had been reading. Realizing the conversation was at an end, Oy quietly left the room.

He wadded up Noguchi's letter and threw it in the wastebasket. Determined to walk the road to success at full tilt, Hond was not inclined to give any thought to some low-level drunkard he had gotten to know during his time in Nagasaki. It annoyed him that a country b.u.mpkin could be so insensitive as to ask something so out of keeping with his place in society, on the dubious grounds that they had had some minor interactions in the distant past.

His head was filled with plans for his imminent journey to America. The diplomatic mission seeking treaty revisions, to be led by Prince Iwakura Tomomi, was set to leave j.a.pan in the eleventh month, and one of the distinguished members of the delegation was Hond, who would be serving as Second Secretary.

The decision to send a delegation to negotiate for treaty revisions was complicated by a power struggle between Kido Takayoshi and kubo Toshimichi, and the corps of translators also was caught up in the vortex of this rivalry, but a prudent Hond had adopted a wait-and-see att.i.tude that kept him aloof from either faction. Wisely, he felt instinctively that the path to worldly success lay in not playing out his hand until the last possible moment.

Once the eleventh month came, there seemed to be farewell parties every night, and each night Oy waited up late for her buoyant husband to return home so that she could nurse him through his intoxication.

With the twelfth day of the eleventh month set as the day the delegation would set sail, the couple spent the night of the tenth alone together, consoling each other over their temporary separation. Oy played the samisen while Shuntar lifted the sake cup to his mouth with a fleshy hand.

"Sitting like this together reminds me of those days in Maruyama."

"It does, doesn't it."

"Now that I think about it, there was a girl at the Yamazaki Teahouse named Kiku, wasn't there ...?"

"Yes."

Of course, flushed as they were in their own happiness, neither Hond nor Oy spent any further time discussing the Kiris.h.i.tans in Tsuwano, much less It. Those people no longer had anything to do with their lives.

"Oy ... This voyage is going to make my career!" Hond smiled triumphantly at his wife.

On the twelfth,1 a clear autumn morning, Hond Shuntar left the port of Yokohama aboard the S.S. America as part of the forty-eight-member Iwakura Mission.

They were not the only pa.s.sengers on the ship. At 10:00 A.M. that same morning, Mr. DeLong, having concluded his term as minister to j.a.pan, along with his wife, were joined by fifty-nine j.a.panese exchange students, including five women, bound for Europe and the United States; they all stood on deck waving farewell to their loved ones. As thirty-four gunshots saluted them, the 4,554-ton America quietly set out into the Pacific Ocean.

Hond leaned against the deck rail and looked out at the great ocean frothing with whitecaps. This was the first time in his life he had seen the vast ocean surrounding him in every direction.

j.a.pan is poised to become a great nation. And I will rise in the world along with my country. Taking a deep breath of the ocean breeze, Hond rea.s.sured himself. He considered Western civilization to be the path to progress, and he had not the slightest doubt that the study of Western civilization meant progress for j.a.pan and the j.a.panese people.

The sparkle of the dazzling ocean before his eyes. The blue sky, swept clear by the strong winds. Right now Hond was completely detached from the bleakness, the incurable sorrow, the cowardice, the baseness, the impurity of heart that defined lives like that of It. As a result, it was just as Pet.i.tjean had said: Hond had no need of G.o.d. He was able to steep himself in the optimism of the modern age, so fully removed from G.o.d.

This industrious man wasted not a moment of time. He tirelessly roamed the foreign ship, recording everything there was to learn, everything there was to know in his diary: The twenty-first of the eleventh month is January 1, 1872, by the Western calendar. So last night the European and American pa.s.sengers all got together. Champagne and brandy were brought out on silver trays, and several other liquors were mixed together in something they called "punch," which they drank as they talked with one another late into the night. The skirts of the women's dresses are very long, and they wear a wiry lantern-shaped contraption they call a "corset," while they puff out their hips with a hoop made of something like thin strips of bamboo. The husbands have to lift up the skirts of their wives who wear these peculiar costumes so they don't step on them.2 As he wrote this, Hond was gripped by an emotion approaching fear as he wondered whether someday j.a.panese men would have to do this for their wives. But he resigned himself to the likelihood that such practices would have to be adopted if they were a product of Western civilization and the custom observed in Europe and the United States.

After an ocean voyage of nearly a month, the ship finally docked in San Francisco. Hond recorded his impressions of seeing a foreign land for the first time that day in a letter addressed to Oy: A thick fog early in the morning. The deck was soaked. They finally made the ship heave to and waited for the dawn. As the dawn broke and the fog lifted, the mountains of Karihorunia (California) appeared before us. Two mountain peaks parted to form a gateway, while the bay beyond was filled with seawater. We could see smoke rising from the steamers that came in and out of the bay. This was the fabled "Golden Gate." We had journeyed across the ocean for twenty-two days, and since this was the first landscape we had seen east of j.a.pan, our joy was indescribable.

More than one hundred j.a.panese lined the deck, enjoying the picturesque view of the Golden Gate. The members of the Iwakura Mission were particularly nervous about the upcoming treaty revision negotiations, but they were confident about their prospects for success.

They had given scarcely any thought to what sort of obstacles might arise in their negotiations in this country because of the policy of suppression that the j.a.panese government had adopted toward the Urakami Kiris.h.i.tans.

Once they made land in the United States, everything the members of the delegation experienced in the great city of San Francisco was a source of astonishment to them. For instance, Shuntar wrote candidly in his diary and in his letters to Oy about his experience of riding for the first time on a hotel elevator: A boy led me into a tiny room occupied by two or three Americans. Suddenly the little room was hoisted up with a loud noise. Then it came to a stop, and at the boy's insistence, I was driven out of the room, where I stood in a daze for a few moments. It's called an "elevator," and it's a useless contraption that goes up and down the stairs.

Everything they saw and heard amazed and stupefied them. Amid their amazement and stupefaction, the members of the j.a.panese delegation made modest efforts to stroke their own pride by noting that America knew nothing of the Way of Confucius and Mencius and that its people were lacking in decorum.

When the group bound for Washington, D.C., left San Francisco and stopped off in Salt Lake City, they learned from a local newspaper that another group of Kiris.h.i.tans had been arrested in j.a.pan. Hond translated the article for them.

Another group of hidden Kiris.h.i.tans had been discovered in Takashima, Ijima, s.h.i.tsu, and Kurosaki in Imari Prefecture (present-day Saga Prefecture), and sixty-seven of them had been jailed in the courthouse.

Hond finally came to the realization that this incident, combined with the earlier imprisonments of all the Kiris.h.i.tans in Urakami, was going to have a profound impact on the treaty negotiations. He reached this conclusion after reading about the public's response in the newspapers and from the reactions of the dignitaries they met in Salt Lake City. He expressed his concerns to his superiors, and some in the delegation began to fear what might lie ahead.

Those fears took tangible form when the New Year arrived and they had an audience with President Grant in Washington.

Amba.s.sador Iwakura and his four deputy delegates, clad in traditional court dress and ceremonial robes, called on the White House, and in a state room they listened to a speech from President Grant in which he declared: "The reason that we in the United States have been able to enjoy prosperity and happiness is because we have placed no limits on freedom of a.s.sociation with foreign lands, on freedom of the press, freedom of religious conscience, and freedom of worship for all our citizens and for every foreigner residing in our country."

His implied exhortation was that in order for j.a.pan to become a modern nation, it would have to open its doors to the world and grant its citizens freedoms of the press, of thought, and of religion; it was in essence a demand that the j.a.panese release the Urakami Kiris.h.i.tans.

Two weeks later, the delegation's conversations with the U.S. Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, even more concretely backed the president's remarks. Fish declared that any treaty revision would have to be predicated on guarantees that j.a.pan would grant freedom of religion to its people.

By now the delegation had gotten the message that recognition of the freedoms of religion and thought was going to be a significant issue as they attempted to achieve revisions in the unequal treaties. They had no choice but to acknowledge that the events in the little village of Urakami in Kyushu, events that they had essentially forgotten all about, were going to play a major role in the treaty revision negotiations between j.a.pan and various foreign powers.

In addition, although the Iwakura Mission had traveled to the United States in order to negotiate for treaty revision, the j.a.panese government had not granted them full authority to sign any treaty drafts on their behalf.

The delegation, thrown into disarray because the United States had detected their inexperience and inept.i.tude, sent It Hirob.u.mi, a member of their entourage, and Mori Arinori,3 who was already living in the United States as charge d'affaires, back to j.a.pan to solicit credentials granting them full diplomatic powers.

The negotiations ran into rough waters. With no resolution to the outstanding issues, the delegation left the United States and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, but in England, too, they encountered many who were critical of the persecution of Kiris.h.i.tans in j.a.pan.

It is no longer wise policy to prohibit the practice of the Kiris.h.i.tan faith. Hond Shuntar gradually arrived at that conclusion. Throughout the United States and Europe, Hond saw majestic church steeples piercing the skies. On Sundays, the bells in those steeples would ring out like undulating waves. He witnessed mult.i.tudes of people who dressed up in formal clothes and climbed into horse-drawn carriages to attend those churches. These observations persuaded Hond of the necessity of allowing religious freedom in j.a.pan, even if only superficially, while still rejecting the Kiris.h.i.tan faith behind the scenes. His experiences abroad planted in his already pragmatic mind the belief that j.a.pan must make these changes or face the prospect that treaty revisions and modernization would run into a dead end.

Every member of the delegation agreed with this conclusion. They sent numerous letters back to j.a.pan, in which they began to urge the abolition of the placards proclaiming the ban on the Kiris.h.i.tan faith.

As a result- In the second month of 1873, the government agreed to the delegation's request and ordered all of the prohibition placards removed.

In Tsuwano there was a complete reversal in the treatment of the prisoners. Following the investigation by Kusumoto and Kat, the daily ration of less than six ounces of rice was increased to almost sixteen ounces, and the tortures were eliminated. After the placards were taken down, the men were granted considerably more freedom in their daily activities. The officers and police no longer watched them with piercing eyes, and at times they even tried to go out of their way to humor the prisoners.

Some officers went so far as to admit, "Well ... you men certainly endured it all very bravely. From our standpoint, it's true that you were stubborn, but I was honestly impressed by your courage in not caving in, even though you're nothing but peasants!"

A full five years had elapsed since Sen'emon and the rest of the first group of exiles had come to Tsuwano, and forty-one of their number (among them five who apostatized) had died from hunger and cold and torture. Those who abandoned their faith, unable to bear the extreme suffering, numbered fifty-four, while sixty-eight men and women clung to their beliefs to the very end.

But the remaining sixty-eight had absolutely no way of knowing why their situation suddenly changed so dramatically. They had been utterly cut off from the outside world in this prison, their internments ranging from three to five years.

"We defeated them by our stubbornness!" Sen'emon muttered with a sly grin.

They did not know. They had no idea that they had become a great stumbling block in j.a.pan's interactions with foreign nations. They did not know. They were not aware that their situation had been discussed by people in the United States and Europe in conversations regarding j.a.pan's modernization. They did not know. They could not have known that even the president of the United States had warned a delegation from j.a.pan to put an end to the persecution they were enduring....

We might return to Urakami alive- A muted hope began to rise in each of their hearts at this time. That hope was as tiny and wispy as the cirrus clouds of spring, but gradually it began to swell in their hearts. Seikichi was among the hopeful.

If I'm able to go back to Urakami-When Seikichi thought of those long-unseen hills and trees and the smell of the earth in Nakano, he also thought of Kiku. During the long years of his painful incarceration, at some point in his mind Kiku had developed into a song of comfort, a wellspring of solace, and an object of love.

These long months and years, during which he had been forsaken by everyone. Of late, he had had no word from her, but there was no way to describe what a tremendous support it had been, not only to him, but to all the prisoners, to receive through It the food and the bleached cotton material and the medicines that Kiku alone had sent. There was even one old woman who clasped her hands in a prayer of thanksgiving for a tiny rice cake. Kiku's gifts became a matchless testament of love to Seikichi....

No matter what it takes ... I've got to see her again. He wanted to see her, he had to see her. That was the most earnest desire of his heart now. The image of Kiku's almond-shaped eyes and the lively expression of her face were constantly before him.

I ... I think I may be in love with her! Even as his face flushed, he could not help but affirm what his heart felt.

In the spring of 1873, he began to feel as though his wish might be fulfilled.

"They're saying that those who were exiled to Wakayama are returning to Urakami." Someone who heard this barely credible news from one of the officers came racing back to their cell to tell everybody.

"From Wakayama ...?"

"Yes!"

A shout of joy rose from all sixty-eight throats. The women covered their faces with both hands and wept aloud. The end to their very long, very painful life in prison was at last approaching. Kanzabur asked one of the officers, "Then will we be going home soon, too?" The officer merely shook his head, "I don't know." But it was clear from the expression on his face that he was concealing something.

In the fifth month, when young leaves flourished in the mountains of Tsuwano and fluttered in the wind as a balmy breeze blew fragrantly by, Sen'emon received a summons after breakfast one day.

"Sen'emon. It's been a long and painful time for you," the officer Chiba said consolingly to Sen'emon, who sat in a respectful posture. "The authorities out of their exceptional benevolence have notified us that all sixty-eight of you will be permitted to return to Urakami Village."

"Yes, sir." Sen'emon stared at the ground as he listened to the words, pushing back the warm emotions welling in his breast.

"Make your preparations and clean your cells so that you can leave here on the ninth."

"Yes, sir." He stood up, but Sen'emon's legs faltered because of his excitement.

The instant he returned to the cell, Sen'emon repeated the officer's words to the other sixty-seven men and women. When he finished speaking, the group maintained their silence for a few moments. Not one of them gave a cry of joy or wept from emotion. Although it was something they had antic.i.p.ated, when they were notified that they would in fact be set free, they could say nothing.

A short time pa.s.sed before the room rippled with sobs. The men, too, wept, their shoulders quivering.

"Listen, everyone," Sen'emon sniffled and encouraged the group, "let's kneel. We need to pray."

All sixty-eight crossed themselves and in one voice intoned the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary.

As they prayed, the faces and forms of relatives who had died in this prison pa.s.sed through each of their minds. They would now finally be able to take back to Urakami the locks of hair they had collected from the deceased.

Even after night fell, there was no one who went right to sleep. All were in high spirits, and some even sang, but on this night no policeman or officer came to chastise them.

I'll be able to see Kiku now. Seikichi thought as he clapped his hands along with the others. The joy of being able to return to Urakami and the delight at being able to see Kiku again surged up in equal measures in his heart.

"Back in Urakami," someone muttered, "can you imagine how beautiful the mountains and the new leaves are right now? But the fields are probably a disaster."

Because they were farmers, it was only natural that they were most worried about their fields. Over the course of these many years, the neglected plots of land had most likely fallen into ruin and were buried in weeds. They would soon need to commence the labors of tilling, digging, and planting crops there.

They were freed from prison on the ninth day of the fifth month. At the time of their release, it was decided that for each person, the government office in Tsuwano would ship eighty-eight pounds of their possessions back to Urakami, with any remainder to be carried individually. It was an unimaginably generous arrangement.

Before their departure, the officers invited five of the men-Sen'emon, Tomohachi, Kanzabur, Sichi, and Seikichi-to have a drink with them. It seemed to be an attempt at an apology for the way they had been treated all this time.

"You men are samurai. Because you maintained your honor right up to the end." The officers were united in their praise for these men who had not abandoned their beliefs.

The sky was clear on the ninth. On the previous day, the sixty-eight men and women had taken the ashes of the forty-one who had died and buried them at Senninzuka-the "Graves of a Thousand"-at the pa.s.s atop Mount Kabusaka. On the ninth they set out from Tsuwano, planning to cover eighteen miles a day.

From Shimonoseki to Kokura, then by steamship from there to mura ...

Their elation expanded with each pa.s.sing day. Their irrepressible joy made them want to break into dance. They could now live their Kiris.h.i.tan faith without anyone pointing fingers at them. That was thrilling.

We ... we won!

Mocked as s.h.i.t-kickers, as Kuros, they had won out over the authorities not through uprising or rebellion but merely by the power of their faith, Sen'emon thought. By nothing other than their fragile faith ...

1. By the Western calendar, the date was December 23, 1871.

2. This and subsequent pa.s.sages from "Hond's diary" are actual descriptions from the official travel journal of the mission kept by k.u.me Kunitake (18391931).

3. Mori Arinori (18471889) studied in London and later became the first j.a.panese amba.s.sador to the United States. He also served as amba.s.sador to England and as Minister of Education during It Hirob.u.mi's term as prime minster. Although scholars doubt rumors that he was a Christian himself, Mori argued for religious freedom in his homeland. Largely because of his pro-Western att.i.tudes, he was a.s.sa.s.sinated by an ultranationalist on the day the Meiji Const.i.tution was promulgated.