Kasuga Village and Mount Yasumandake

There is no church at Kasuga, and that is the point of coming. When the ban on Christianity ended in 1873, most Hidden Christian villages in Nagasaki rejoined the Catholic Church and built the churches that fill tourist brochures today. Kasuga did not. Its people went on with the faith as it had taken shape over two and a half centuries without priests, and that is why the village and Mount Yasumandake above it are one of the 12 parts of the Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region, inscribed as World Heritage in 2018. With the islet of Nakaenoshima, a separate part, they form the group called Kasuga Village and Sacred Places in Hirado.

The village sits in a shallow valley on the west coast of Hirado Island, between two ridges running down from Yasumandake, with rice terraces stepping down to the sea. Christianity reached it after Francis Xavier's visit to Hirado in 1550, and a Jesuit letter of 1563 already records a Christian confraternity here. After the local ban of 1599 and the last missionary's martyrdom in 1622, villagers hid their sacred objects in a back storeroom and prayed towards two places: Yasumandake, a mountain worshipped long before Christianity arrived, and Nakaenoshima, an islet offshore where Christians were executed and where they later drew holy water. The organised group in Kasuga broke up between 1965 and 1974; today the old objects are kept privately in a few homes.

Start at Katarina, a village house turned information centre, where residents sit and talk visitors through the history and some of those ritual objects are on show. Maruoyama, the small round hill in the middle of the village, is where early Christians are thought to have been buried. Yasumandake, the highest point on Hirado at roughly 530 metres, has Hakusan Hime Shrine, said to date from 718, with an old stone approach and torii, the ruins of Saizen-ji temple and, behind the shrine, small stone shrines the villagers called the Christian shrine. From the trailhead car park the summit takes 30 to 40 minutes. Nakaenoshima cannot be visited; you see it from the coast. This is a working village, so keep to the roads and leave the fields alone.