This picks up where my Seibo no Kishi post left off. I woke in a room beneath the church at Seibo no Kishi, the convent founded by St Maximilian Kolbe in Nagasaki. The morning bells rang at what I guessed was a 5 a.m. rising, then 5:40 for prayers and meditation, then 6:25, five minutes before Mass. Mass was in the side chapel and open to everyone. Afterwards I took a taxi to the ferry terminal.
A ferry on tatami
Foot-passenger tickets for the car ferry go on sale only an hour before departure, so I thought I’d timed it well. There was no queue, and despite the 8:05 departure for Narushima (via Fukue), we didn’t board until 15 minutes beforehand.
The passenger deck is covered in tatami squares. The locals knew the drill: lay out a blanket and a block-shaped pillow, and settle in for a few hours. When in Rome, or in Nagasaki, do as the locals do. The younger passengers made for the few wall sockets to charge their phones.
Mr Kakimori
When we docked at Fukue, new passengers came aboard, and I met Mr Kakimori. He has lived on Narushima since 2008 in the coastal house that was his mother’s. He spent childhood summers on this island, where around 70% of the population were once Hidden Christians, at a time when more than 9,000 people lived here. Today there are fewer than 2,000 islanders, and the proportion is probably about the same.
Mr Kakimori was baptised into the Catholic Church, but most of the island’s Hidden Christian families never returned to it. The reason he gave was that a missionary had asked them to get rid of, even burn, the objects their ancestors had kept and prayed with in secret for centuries, and they refused. He told me that a distorted Latin version of the Ave Maria survived here, and that the number three carried special weight. One prayer was recited 33 times, and the practice of repeating it 55 times seems to be a faint memory of the rosary. The Ave Maria was last chanted on the island nearly 30 years ago.
He has worked hard to record these dying traditions and to help the Hidden Christian sites gain World Heritage listing. He is also the guardian of the Akogi path. His hope is that understanding their past will make the islanders proud of their heritage, and perhaps lead some of them home.
Egami and the Akogi path
I hadn’t booked a rental bike, so I became his guest. We visited his house, which holds a small Hidden Christian museum and sits on the Akogi path. Then he suggested a swim and took me to Egami Church, a wooden church built by Hidden Christian descendants. Mass is said there once a month, on the third Sunday.
I stayed at the newly opened St Ignatius Albergue, which may be Japan’s only purpose-built pilgrim accommodation. From the marker stone near my lodging I walked the first 1.7 km of the Akogi path, after climbing over a fence built to keep out wild boar. The path is beautiful and almost unused. I had to clear spider webs as I went, and it led towards Mr Kakimori’s house. With the day slipping away, I turned back along the same path, now free of webs, and saved the next section for the following day. The plan is to extend the route to nearby caves where Christians could once pray aloud without being heard, which would make it a walk of more than 8 km.
Bloom and grow
G.K. Chesterton asked in The Everlasting Man who does not feel that the death and resurrection of growing things is close to the secret of the universe. In Japan, Christianity was crushed almost to nothing, and in Nagasaki it was crushed at an atomic level. Yet here we are.
As I wrote these lines at the table of Japan’s only pilgrim hostel, the 7 a.m. chime played what sounded like “Edelweiss”. I couldn’t help singing along to “bloom and grow”. That is my prayer for the Christians of these islands.
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