Photo/Illutration Ono Church is a Christian church located in Shimo Ono in Nagasaki. The church is a part of the “Hidden Christian Sites” on the Nagasaki region's World Heritage listing. (Photo by Lisa Vogt)

Driving about an hour in a downpour while heading north from downtown Nagasaki, I gazed to the left out the car window at the East China Sea and vaguely saw the outline of some small islands through the fog.

On my right were steep hills with overgrown foliage and an occasional building. Google Maps told me to take a right up into the hills. I obediently did, and the road narrowed.

“Next, a sharp left,” it said, and as it was too sharp, I drove up the road and did a U-turn, then turned again. I’d reached my destination, Ono Church in the Sotome area, a small house of worship built on a small patch of land seemingly hidden in the middle of nowhere.

Ono Church was designed and paid for by Father de Rotz (1840-1914), a French missionary priest born into nobility who spent the fortune he inherited to help the desolate people he encountered in Sotome. The church has distinctive "dorokabe" mud walls fashioned from a mixture of sand, lime, clay and basalt rock.

De Rotz led the construction of Ono Church in 1893 for 26 Catholic households after the ban on Christianity was lifted in 1873.

Much earlier, in 1571, the Jesuit Francisco Cabral brought Christianity to the people of Ono village, baptizing many.

When the Tokugawa Shogunate banned the religion in 1614, many believers went underground, organizing secret religious communities while outwardly behaving as Buddhists and Shintoists. These devotees and other hidden Christians in Japan astonishingly managed to continue their faith for seven generations—about 250 years—despite persecution, bloodshed, and no missionaries or priestly leadership. In the words of Pope Pius IX, it’s “the Miracle of the Orient.”

There were three Shinto shrines in Ono that the hidden Christians here outwardly prayed to as non-Christian farmers and fishers. The largest is Ono Jinja, located along the main seaside road. It is almost laughably tiny as I had to stoop down to walk underneath its stone torii.

The second is Kado Jinja, which uses the kanji for “gate” and enshrines, among other gods, Honda Toshimitsu, a Japanese Christian who fled to Ono when the Shimabara Rebellion broke out in 1637.

The third is Tsuji Jinja, the kanji for which is made up of a road and a cross. The Christians called the deity here “Sanjuwan-sama” from a Portuguese missionary.

Unwavering devotion and the indomitable human spirit that endured in secrecy are fading now thanks to religious freedom, and they need World Heritage Site protection. How ironic.

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This article by Lisa Vogt, a Washington-born and Tokyo-based photographer, originally appeared in the August 6 issue of Asahi Weekly. It is part of the series "Lisa’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Japan," which depicts various parts of the country through the perspective of the author, a professor at Aoyama-gakuin University.

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