The collection

These documents are primarily requests, questions, notifications, attestations, etc. submitted by villages, temples, etc. to the Usuki Domain’s Office of Religious Affairs relating to relatives of former Christians. Their content covers marriage, adoption, divorce, the severing of family ties, academic study / training, missing individuals, moving (people returning to their family registry, etc.), tonsure, name changes, and parishioner temple changes. Second greatest in number are questions and notifications submitted upon relatives of former Christians temporarily going somewhere else for business, pilgrimages, hot springs therapy, etc. The above two kinds of documents (over 600 of them) are found in A7.2, A7.4, and A7.6–9. Documents within this file are organized into thirty groups of varying sizes based on content and date. There are traces of Marega and/or his assistants organizing the documents (wrappers, string, memos, etc.), as well as of how documents were managed at the Office of Religious Affairs. For example, the thirty-seven items in A7.9.1 are grouped together with a hōshi made by the Office of Religious Affairs.

There is also a group of various documents created / acquired by the office (documents related to purchases, pieces of paper, etc.; A7.3), and a group of seven oaths submitted to the office by households in Mochida Village (Ōno District) dated the seventeenth day of the eleventh month of 1635 (Kan’ei 12; A7.5). The former is held together with a modern paper sheet and envelope, and thus was probably created when Marega was going through these documents. The latter, on the other hand, has a piece of paper attached to it on which is written “seven oaths” in Japanese, and thus appears to have been the creation of the Office of Religious Affairs.

The documents in A7 were all numbered by Marega with a stamp, pencil, or pen (M331 to M800.6). A single number (or multiple sub–numbers) were assigned to sets of two or three documents with the same content, which indicates that Marega and/or his assistants grasped the content of these documents to an extent.