St. Mary Kannon of Hara Castle
A visit to the world's largest statue of the Virgin Mary, in Nagasaki Prefecture
My tour group visited this statue titled St. Mary Kannon of Hara Castle in October during our pilgrimage to Japan. This 10-meter (32-foot) carved wooden statue of Our Lady holding the Christ Child was completed and moved to its current location last year by Eiji Oyamatsu, its 88-year-old sculptor, from his atelier in Fujisawa, Kanagawa about 750 miles away. It is now in a building constructed by civic-minded volunteers in rural Minami-Shimabara, Nagasaki Prefecture—about forty miles west of our hotel in Nagasaki City. The volunteers also raised the cost of transporting the statue, which ran to about $770,000 US. The building housing the statue sits on a site overlooking the ruins of Hara Castle, on the green hilly, blue ocean-surrounded Shimabara peninsula. The site also overlooks the Amakusa Islands where battles also took place during the Shimabara Rebellion.
The Hara Castle ruins, which we visited next, are memorialized as the site where the famous Shimabara Rebellion was crushed. 37,000 rebels were decapitated after their defenses erected around the empty castle were breached after a long siege. The victors burned and buried their bodies along with whatever remained of the castle. All that is left are a few low walls that have been excavated, grass-covered mounds, and signboards in Japanese and English.
Nagasaki was so Catholic it was referred to as the Rome of the East. Portuguese were using the city of Nagasaki as an active trading port. After the Shimabara Rebellion, because European Catholics were suspected of involvement, Portuguese traders were banned along with missionaries from any nation.
Japan’s seclusion was made stricter by 1639, and the existing ban on the Catholic religion was then even more strictly enforced. Catholics in Japan survived only by going underground for 250 years, and their reemergence astonished many including the pope (more about that in another post).
The statue’s name “St. Mary Kannon" refers to statues of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child disguised as the Buddhist deity Kannon (Goddess of Mercy) that the Hidden Christians (Catholics) created and venerated to prevent officials from detecting their devotion to Christ and His Mother.
On the Shimabara peninsula, most towns were either completely or close to completely emptied after the rebels were defeated, and the government moved in farmers from different areas to replace them.
The rebellion came about this way. Shimabara had been ruled by Christian daimyos (feudal lords under the shogun (ruler) when in 1614 Matsukura Shigemasa was made ruler. His regime generated strong resistance because he strictly enforced the existing but not usually enforced prohibition against Christianity with mass executions. He also taxed the peasants mercilessly to finance the construction of his new castle, for the building and expansion of Edo Castle, as well for as a planned invasion of Luzon, now part of the Philippines. The Shimabara Rebellion began after his son Matsukura Katsuie took power and continued to enforce his father’s hated policies.
Amakusa Shirō, the young leader of the Shimabara-Amakusa Rebellion, was so charismatic that at the age of fifteen he was called “Heaven’s messenger.” His name seems to designate the islands from which he came. His real name was Geronimo. He was later known as Francisco. After he too was decapitated at the age of 17, Amakusa Shirō's severed head was taken to Nagasaki City for public display.
Around 1971, the statue’s sculptor, Eiji Oyamatsu, a Roman Catholic, visited the remains of Hara Castle and was struck by the absence of memorials there to the souls of the Shimabara Rebellion’s dead. He prayed to be given a mission that he could dedicate his life to, and he got his answer. "Praying for the souls of the abandoned. That’s what kept me going.” He worked on it for forty years1
The statue was planned to be 32 feet high, and obviously a tree that size is hard to come by. So Oyamatsu carved and constructed the statue using the technique called Azekura-zukuri, which involves the cutting of large camphor trees into thick round slices, stacking them up on top of each other, log-house style, and carving them as part of the whole image.
We prayed a rosary at the statue and donated to the cause of completing the visitor center for the statue, before we moved on to our next stop at the Hana Castle ruins. Whether or not the statue appeals to one’s aesthetic sense, the selfless devotion of its creator is inspiring.
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