Hakodate: The Work of Keeping Faith

In 1872, Japanese Orthodox believers in Hakodate were arrested. A church had already stood beside the Russian consulate for more than a decade. The two facts are compatible: permission for foreigners to worship was not permission for every Japanese person to join them.^[1][2]

This difference is difficult to see in Motomachi's familiar church skyline. Orthodox, Catholic, and Anglican buildings occupy neighboring hillside sites, apparently settled into the city's identity. Farther around the foot of Mount Hakodate, the Hekketsuhi monument marks another kind of religious place: a memorial to men who died fighting on the losing side of the war of 1868–1869. It stands apart from the churches, in a separate commemorative landscape.^[3][10]

The churches and monument did not originate in one gesture of civic welcome. They grew through different negotiations over who could worship, who would provide a room, what should be rebuilt, and how the dead should be remembered. Their history is best followed through the people and institutions that made these places usable—and then kept finding reasons to use them.

Hakodate's opening brought foreign representatives to a town that had no ready-made consular quarter. Existing institutions supplied some of the necessary accommodation. In 1858, the newly arrived Russian consul used Jitsugyō-ji, a Buddhist temple, as his initial base. Three years earlier, the same temple had accommodated sick sailors from the French warship Sibylle. A port receiving international traffic needed places for bodies as well as ships.^[4]

These arrangements put an older religious establishment inside the practical work of opening the port. The temple possessed premises that could shelter people and sustain activities beyond its regular worship. Using those premises did not require its clergy to share the newcomers' beliefs. It did require arrangements between people who already had a place in the town and people who needed one.

Catholic activity began through a comparable use of existing space. In 1859, the French missionary Mermet de Cachon established himself at Shōmyō-ji and celebrated Mass for foreigners. The city's account also records language teaching to samurai and his own study of Japanese and Ainu. Religious work and linguistic exchange occupied the same early setting.^[5]

The legal opening was specific. Article Four of the 1858 Franco-Japanese treaty protected French subjects' religious practice and their construction of religious buildings in their places of residence. The corresponding protections in other treaties likewise concerned foreigners. Japanese acceptance of foreign worship did not amount to a general authorization for Japanese conversion.^[2]

The Russian consul subsequently chose a hillside position commanding views across the harbor. The consulate and its attached chapel were established there in 1860. Nicholas, the priest later central to the Orthodox mission in Japan, arrived in 1861.^[6] A recognizable religious address was taking shape, but its initial constituency and diplomatic protection remained different from those of an ordinary Japanese congregation.

The earliest history of these churches consequently lies partly outside their present buildings. It includes Buddhist premises, temporary accommodation, and a treaty distinction between populations living in the same port. The skyline was an eventual result, not the starting condition.

A consular chapel could serve people who brought their religion with them. Establishing a Japanese church required people to learn, explain, and practice a faith that had previously been prohibited. Translation was part of that change in audience.

The Orthodox church's chronology records Japanese baptisms in 1868. By 1871, religious texts—including prayers and a catechism, a question-and-answer explanation of belief—were being lithographically printed. Japanese religious instruction was becoming reproducible: a teacher no longer had to rely entirely on an individual conversation with a foreign priest. Texts could support repeated learning and be taken beyond the original place of instruction.^[1]

Printed words alone supplied no protection from the authorities. The same chronology records the detention of Sakai Tokurei, one of the early converts, and other Japanese evangelists in 1872; it also records releases later that year. Those entries prevent the consular church's existence from being mistaken for the secure position of its Japanese adherents.^[1]

The national framework changed in 1873, when the government ordered the removal of the public signboards prohibiting Christianity. The National Archives preserves the relevant proclamation of 24 February. That act belongs to a later stage than the treaties under which foreign worship had become possible.^[7]

A congregation was thus being made through several processes that moved at different speeds. Buildings established an address. Translation made teaching available in another language. Japanese believers supplied relationships through which it could circulate. Changes in government policy altered the conditions under which they could act. A date for the first chapel captures only one of these developments.

Nicholas moved to Tokyo in 1872, extending his missionary work beyond Hakodate.^[6] His departure also makes the local problem clearer. For the hillside church to endure, its history could not remain the history of one foreign priest's residence. The Japanese people learning and transmitting its faith were becoming part of what would outlast that residence.

Fire repeatedly separated the survival of a community from the survival of its church. The original Orthodox building burned in 1907. The present church was completed in 1916. Its white walls, roofs, and interior religious furnishings belong to a rebuilding carried out long after the first consular chapel.^[6]

The Catholic sequence was more complicated. A wooden church erected in 1877 was destroyed in the same 1907 disaster. Its brick successor suffered in the fire of 1921. Reconstruction reused surviving brick walls beneath a mortar finish, and a tall bell tower became part of the renewed building. The church's own account and Hakodate's municipal description date the present church to 1923.^[5][8]

Reusing walls did two things at once. It retained part of a damaged structure and constrained the space available for the replacement interior. A congregation rebuilding on those terms was neither starting on an empty plot nor simply returning to an untouched room. It was making a working church within the physical consequences of a disaster.

The Catholic parish's account describes Bishop Berlioz raising money overseas after the fires, including a prolonged American fundraising journey after the later destruction. It also identifies the central and side altars and the carved Stations of the Cross as gifts associated with Pope Benedict XV, made in a Tyrolean workshop. The restoration drew on relationships extending well beyond the harbor from which the mission had begun.^[8]

These furnishings had religious tasks. The Stations present a sequence through Christ's Passion; an altar organizes the celebration of worship. Replacing them meant re-equipping a church for a congregation, not merely decorating a building for people viewing it from the street. The international connection that supplied them operated through a shared religious institution, rather than through a preference for something foreign-looking.

The parish also records a much later alteration: its formerly white ceiling was painted blue and given golden stars during the 1970s.^[8] That smaller intervention belongs to another period of use. The interior was still capable of acquiring changes chosen by the people responsible for it, instead of existing only as the recovered appearance of an earlier generation.

Fire therefore explains more than why an old institution has newer walls. It exposes the work required to continue: retaining usable fabric, finding funds, replacing ritual equipment, and deciding what the rebuilt space should contain. The repeated decision to provide another church is itself part of the history preserved by the site.

The Anglican church adds a different timescale. The Diocese of Hokkaidō dates the beginning of its Hakodate mission to Walter Dening in 1874. Its account describes repeated losses to fire and work in education and medical care. The present St. John Church was completed in 1979—more than a century after that beginning.^[9]

This comparatively recent building is essential to understanding the group. A skyline composed entirely of nineteenth-century survivors might suggest that religious diversity arrived once and remained architecturally fixed. St. John's supplies evidence of a community commissioning a new building within living memory. Its place in Motomachi does not depend on disguising that date.

Orthodox, Catholic, and Anglican identify different Christian traditions, with different institutional connections and forms of worship. Their associations with Russian, French, and British arrivals explain parts of their beginnings; they do not make the later churches permanent national exhibits. The Japanese Orthodox believers in the earlier chronology already show how incomplete that reading would be. People could enter a religious community without becoming representatives of the country from which its missionaries came.

Nor does proximity turn the three congregations into a single institution. Each building answers to its own worship and history. Their closeness allows comparison, while their differences prevent the hillside from becoming one undifferentiated piece of “Western architecture.” The 1916 Orthodox rebuilding, the Catholic church renewed after the 1921 fire, and the 1979 Anglican building express different decisions made at different moments.^[6][5][9]

A second religious landscape around the mountain grew through another set of decisions. There, the question was not how to establish worship among newcomers, but how people already dead would acquire a lasting place in the city.

The Hakodate War ended in 1869 with the surrender of the forces opposing the new Meiji government. Hekketsuhi commemorates the former-shogunate dead. It is a memorial and burial landscape created after combat, rather than a surviving position from which they fought.^[10]

Local tradition assigns a central role to Yanagawa Kumakichi, a civilian associated with the recovery and burial of bodies. It also names the carpenter Ōoka Sukeemon and Jitsugyō-ji's priest, Nichiryū. More dramatic versions include defiance of a prohibition, arrest, and rescue from execution. The city's published biography explicitly warns that documentation confirming its transmitted narrative is uncertain; the memorial association likewise introduces the recovery story as tradition. The detailed heroic episodes cannot safely stand in for a record of what happened.^[11][12]

There is firmer evidence for a later movement of the dead. The association reproduces an August 1881 report from the Hakodate Shimbun: remains had been buried at several temples, and Miyaji Sukesaburō was paying to move graves as temple relocations proceeded. The newspaper's account describes a dispersed burial landscape undergoing another change years after the fighting.^[12]

A grave could therefore have a history of movement. Recovery after battle, burial in a temple precinct, transfer during changes to the city, and commemoration at a monument were separate acts. Treating all of them as one scene of Kumakichi gathering the dead would erase the later participants and practical circumstances.

Jitsugyō-ji connects this history with the port's earlier accommodation of foreigners. The institution used as the Russian consul's first base also appears in the burial and memorial records. Its own premises changed after fire: it moved to its present site in 1881, and the current building dates to 1918.^[4] The connection is institutional, not a claim that the same surviving room housed a consul and received casualties.

An established temple could supply premises for an unfamiliar arrival and later a framework for caring for the dead. That helps explain why older Buddhist institutions remain important to a historical area now so readily identified by churches and a separate mountain monument.

Hekketsuhi was erected in 1875. The cultural-property catalogue records stone from Izu, worked in Tokyo and shipped to Hakodate. The monument was itself a product of connections between the port and people elsewhere who wanted the dead commemorated.^[10]

Its name invokes a Chinese story of blood becoming blue-green jade after a righteous death. The invocation assigns an honorable meaning to the deaths it commemorates. It is the memorial's claim, rather than an explanation of every soldier's reasons for fighting.

The short inscription on the reverse is markedly less explicit about the conflict. It refers to an event in the cyclical years corresponding to 1868 and 1869 and to erecting a stone on the mountain to express its sponsors' purpose. Its phrase for the war is simply “this event.” Municipal interpretation reads that indirect wording as evidence of difficulty in publicly honoring the defeated.^[10]

The inscription's brevity does not establish a particular censorship order. What it does establish is the division of work between the stone and the people around it. The stone supplies a date and an act of commemoration. Identifying the event, the dead, and the meaning of their association requires knowledge carried outside those few characters.

A later memorial register performed part of that work. The Hekketsu association describes a volume attributed to Enomoto Takeaki and dated 1907, containing separate lists for the Hakodate and northeastern campaigns. Its approximately eight hundred names form a commemorative grouping; they should not be mistaken for a verified count of bodies beneath the monument. The association itself notes uncertainty about how and when the lists were compiled.^[12]

Public rites gave the grouping another form. Hakodate's municipal history distinguishes commemorations of the government dead at the Shōkonsha, a shrine for the war dead, from the Jitsugyō-ji-associated Hekketsuhi ceremonies. It cites a newspaper report of a particularly substantial memorial observance in 1881. The city's commemorative life developed more than one center, rather than absorbing all the dead into a single account of the war.^[13]

The monument, register, and ceremony answer different needs: a location at which to gather, people to name, and an occasion for assembling. Their combination made remembrance repeatable without making every memory identical.

One detail of the rites reveals how repetition could include a new choice. A municipal report first published in 2012 describes Jitsugyō-ji clergy conducting sange, the scattering of flowers in an offering. Instead of the paper petals often used, they scattered fresh marguerites. The temple's abbot explained that an earlier abbot had introduced the practice, and that the flowers were grown in the temple garden and picked on the morning of the ceremony.^[14]

The account connects the mountain monument to work elsewhere in the city. The flower offering began before the participants reached the stone. A garden supplied something the monument could not provide for itself; clergy and organizers brought it into the ceremony. This was a particular inherited practice, renewed through fresh material rather than preserved as an old object.

The report also names descendants, association members, residents, and children among the participants. Their relationships with the dead were not all the same. Family connection was one reason to attend; participation in the city's continuing commemoration was another. In June 2026, the association again reported holding the ceremony and bringing together members from around Japan.^[14][15]

Motomachi's churches endure through comparable requirements for continued action, though their religious purposes differ from the memorial's. Printed teaching helped a congregation develop beyond a consular chapel. Fundraising and replacement furnishings made worship possible after fire. A modern Anglican building provided a new setting for an older community. At Hekketsuhi, records, caretakers, and rites continued the work a stone could only begin.

Taken together, these places show how religious life became established in Hakodate through more than the arrival of beliefs or the erection of monuments. It acquired premises, local practitioners, and ways to renew itself after the founding generation was gone. The churches and the memorial remain separate places. The history linking them lies in the port city's repeated work of giving worship and remembrance somewhere to continue.