Shimofuji Christian Cemetery

Sixty-Six Graves That Came Through Intact

Shimofuji Christian Cemetery is a burial ground of Japanese Christians from the late Warring States period into the Edo period, at Hara in Notsu-machi, Usuki City, Oita Prefecture, designated a national Historic Site on 15 October 2018. The designated area covers 1,487 square metres. It lies on a ridge at the northeastern corner of the Hirobaru plateau, 130 metres above sea level, on the left bank of the Notsu River, a tributary of the Ono.

Excavation by the Usuki City Board of Education identified 66 Christian graves, a small building on foundation stones and the trace of a road, within an area 35 metres north to south and 18 metres east to west. Christianity was banned for more than two centuries, and no other cemetery of this kind has survived with both its above-ground and below-ground remains together. That is why Shimofuji Christian Cemetery was designated.

Why It Was Designated

The criterion applied was tombs and monuments. The Agency for Cultural Affairs notes that the remains above and below ground are well preserved, and that no other Christian cemetery has both a known founder and a documented context, which makes the site important for understanding how Christianity was received in Japan.

The founder was a leading figure of Shimofuji village known by his baptismal name, Leão. Around the time the Bungo daimyo Otomo Yoshishige converted in 1578, Jesuits were preaching in Notsu in Bungo Province, and records speak of several thousand converts. In his History of Japan the missionary Luís Fróis writes that Leão built a church on his own land around 1579 and laid out a Christian cemetery on the hill above it. Analysis of land registers and cadastral maps places Leão's house within Shimofuji village, and this site, on the hill to its west, is taken to be the cemetery Fróis describes.

A written account of how a cemetery was founded, confirmed on the ground by excavation: among Christian cemeteries in Japan, only here. Before the national designation, the site had been listed as a prefectural Historic Site of Oita on 15 March 2013, under the name Shimofuji District Christian Cemetery.

How the Graves Were Made

The 66 graves fall into two groups: those marked with unworked stones, and those marked with material taken from medieval stone monuments and reused. Graves made from whatever stone lay to hand stand alongside graves built from dismantled pagodas of an earlier age.

Iron nails and skull fragments came out of the grave pits. The position of the nails indicated rectangular wooden coffins, and the burials are understood to have been extended, the body laid out full length. No cremation, the body placed in a coffin: this is not how the dead were usually treated in Japan at the time. The grave pits at Shimofuji Christian Cemetery are physical evidence that this village buried its dead by the practice of the European church.

Besides the graves, excavation found a small building on foundation stones and the line of a road. The site was not only a burial plot but a place with an approach and a structure of some kind.

Visiting

Shimofuji Christian Cemetery is an open site with no opening hours and no admission fee. The excavated remains, however, have been backfilled for their own protection. Usuki City explains that keeping them exposed was not feasible. Visiting the site therefore does not mean seeing the 66 graves.

Local people once called this ground simply Kirishitan and treated it as sacred, a place not to be entered, and they kept it that way for generations. The completeness of what survived owes a good deal to that. Visitors might bear the history in mind.

In place of the remains, the Usuki City Board of Education produced a virtual reality reconstruction of the cemetery to be viewed on site. Its availability has changed over time, so check with the city before travelling. Enquiries go to the Culture and Cultural Properties Division of Usuki City, on 0972-72-1072.

The address is Hara, Notsu-machi, Usuki City. The site sits on the plateau, and there is no permanent interpretive facility there.