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Diversity or Apostasy? The Case of the Japanese ‘Hidden Christians’*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
When Christian missionaries returned to Japan in 1859, after having been excluded from that country for over two centuries, they hoped that there might be some possibility of making contact with descendants of Japan’s original evangelized communities, and locating some folk memory of the so-called ‘Christian Century’, which had ended with the expulsion of European priests in 1614, and the persecution of native Christians. None of the newly arrived missionaries, however, had been prepared for the discovery of active secret communities who had maintained the Christian faith as an underground church for seven generations. Yet this was the revelation experienced by Father Bernard Petitjean of the French Société des Missions Étrangères in the porch of the newly consecrated church at Õura in Nagasaki, on 17 March 1865:
Urged no doubt by my guardian angel, I went up and opened the door. I had scarce time to say a Pater when three women between fifty and sixty years of age knelt down beside me and said in a low voice, placing their hands upon their hearts: ‘The hearts of all of us here do not differ from yours.’
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1996
Footnotes
*
Research for this paper was carried out as part of a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Travelling Fellowship, which is gratefully acknowledged.
References
1 For the history of Japan’s ‘Christian Century’ see Boxer, C. R., The Christian Century in Japan, 2nd edn (Berkeley, Cal., 1967)Google Scholar; Elison, George, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Harvard, 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 From the most detailed account of the incident in J. Mamas, La Religion de Jesus, laso Ja-Kyō ressucitée au Japon dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris, 1896), pp. 487-91.
3 Cary, Otis, Christianity in Japan, a History of Roman Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Missions (Rutland, Vermont, 1976), p. 277.Google Scholar
4 Breen, John L., ‘Heretics in Nagasaki: 1790-1796’ in Nish, Ian, ed. Contemporary European Writing on Japan (Tenterden, 1988), p. 597.Google Scholar
5 The most important studies of the nature of the underground church in Japan as revealed at the time of their rediscovery by the Europeans are Masaharu Anesaki, Kirishitan shōmon no hakugai to senpuku [The Persecution and Underground Activity of the Christian Faith] (Tokyo, 1925) and Wasaburō Urakawa, Kirishitan no Fukkatsu [The Resurrection of Christianity] 2 vols (Tokyo, 1928). Japanese names are given here with the surnames last.
6 The community of Zenchō-dani has been little studied in comparison with other Hidden Christian groups. There are accounts in Kōya Tagita, Shōwa-jidai no Senpuku Kirishitan [Secret Christians of the Present Age] (Tokyo, 1954), pp. 74-5, 333-4; Kataoka, Yakichi, Kakure Kirishitan [The Hidden Christians] (Tokyo, 1967), p. 272 Google Scholar; and the most detailed account in Chizuko Kataoka, ‘Nagasaki Hantō no Kirishitan-shi’ [‘A history of Christianity in the Nagasaki peninsula’] in Sanwa-chō Kyōdoshi [Local History of Sanwa Township[ by various authors (Nagasaki, 1986), pp. 702-25.
7 Yuuki, Diego. ‘The Crypto-Christians of Nagasaki’, Japanese Religions, 19 (1994), p. 123.Google Scholar
8 For the fumi-e see Yakichi Kataoka, Fumi-e: Kinkyō no Rekishi [Image Trampling: a History of Prohibition) (Tokyo, 1969).
9 Kataoka, ‘Nagasaki’, p. 713. There appears to have been some theatrical posturing around mock expulsion to save the shōya’s face.
10 The temple registration system had been introduced deliberately to suppress Christianity. See Kenneth Marcure, ‘The Danka System’, Monumenta Nipponica, 40 (1985), pp. 39-67. For most of Japan’s history the indigenous religion of Shintō, and Buddhism, introduced from abroad, have coexisted peacefully with much intermingling.
11 Kataoka, Kakure, p. 272. Shintō is a religion that lays great stress on purification, the most important ritual elements being water and salt. The purificatory sand would have been spread beneath the shrine building as described in Jean Herbert, Shinto: At the Fountain-Head of Japan (London, 1967), p. 82.
12 Kataoka, ‘Nagasaki’, p. 713.
13 For the predictions of Bastian, who saw ‘confessors returning in huge black ships’, see Stephen Turnbull, ‘From Catechist to Kami: martyrs and mythology among the Kakure Kirishitan’, Japanese Religions, 19 (1994), p. 73.
14 Mojō was tortured in prison and executed. See Tumbull, ‘From Catechist to Kami’, p. 75, and full accounts in Urakawa, Wasaburō, Urakami Kirishitan-shi [A History of Christianity in Urakami] (Tokyo, 1943), p. 32 Google Scholar, and Kataoka, Yakichi, Nihon Kirishitan Junkyōshi [A History of Christian Martyrdom in Japan] (Tokyo, 1979), p. 555.Google Scholar
15 For a good discussion of the attitude of the French missionaries see Harrington, Ann M., Japan’s Hidden Christians (Chicago, 1993), pp. 113–23 Google Scholar, which is based on the original records and diaries of the priests.
16 Harrington, Japan, p. 113.
17 Ibid., p. 120.
18 Ibid., p. 116.
19 Secret Christian funerals are described by Furuno, Kiyoto in Kakure Kirishitan [The Hidden Christians] (Tokyo, 1959), p. 143 Google Scholar and Kataoka, Kakure, pp. 287-9.
20 Marnas, La Religion, p. 433.
21 Smith, Robert J., Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Japan (Stanford, 1974), p. 84 Google Scholar, notes newspaper reports of ihai being rescued from burning buildings at great personal risk.
22 Furuno, Kakure, p. 106. The destruction of butsudan and ihai had been a prominent feature of the great zeal shown by the first Christian converts during the sixteenth century, as noted in Cary, History, p. 59. It is now conventional to use the term Kakure Kirishitan (literally ‘Hidden Christians’) only for the communities who chose to remain separate subsequent to the missionaries’ return, to distinguish them from the Senpuku Kirishitan (secret Christians) of the time of persecution, who are often referred to simply as ‘Christians’.
23 Kataoka, ‘Nagasaki’, p. 717.
24 Ibid., p. 716.
25 Tagìta, Shōwa, p. 333.
26 For examples see Turnbull, Stephen, ‘The veneration of the martyrs of Ikitsuki (1609-1645) by the “Hidden Christians” of Japan.’ SCH, 30 (1993), pp. 295–310 Google Scholar; idem, , ‘Martyrs and Matsuri: The massacre of the Hidden Christians of Ikitsuki in 1645 and its relationship to local Shintō tradition’, Japan Forum, 6 (1994), pp. 159–74.Google Scholar
27 Tagita, Shōwa, p. 75. The Maria-Kannon is so called from the use of Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, as a disguise.
28 Kataoka, ‘Nagasaki’, p. 718.
29 Ibid., p. 719.
30 Tagita, Shōwa, p. 333. The term go inkyō-sama refers to the practice by the Kakure Kirishitan of preserving old images and holy pictures when they have worn out and have been replaced by new ones, as noted in Yakichi Kataoka, Kinsei no chika shinkō [Underground Faiths of the Present Day] (Tokyo, 1974), p. 50.
31 Kataoka, ‘Nagasaki’, p. 719.
32 Tagita, Shōwa, p. 333. I visited the shrine in 1993.
33 Kataoka, ‘Nagasaki’, p. 719.
34 Tagita, Shōwa, p. 334. Kami are the numinous entities that are the focus of worship in Shintō.
35 Kataoka, ‘Nagasaki’, p. 719. There are numerous folk-beliefs among Japanese fishing communities regarding drowned men. According to Ōtō Tokohiko, , ‘The taboos of fishermen’, in Dorson, Richard, ed., Studies in Japanese Folklore (Bloomington, Ind., 1963), p. 112 Google Scholar: ‘drowned men, often called nagare-botoke (floating Buddhas), are used in supplicatory rites aimed at increasing catches offish, after their corpses are encountered floating at sea.’ Drowning victims washed ashore are not employed in this fashion, but like all victims of disaster throughout Japan they may be deified as a means of placating their spirits, lest they prove violent or revengeful.
36 Kataoka, ‘Nagasaki’, p. 720.
37 Nosco, Peter, ‘Secrecy and the transmission of tradition: issues in the study of the “Underground” Christians’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 20 (1993), p. 26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar