Kakure Kirishitan

“In 1549 the first Christian missionaries arrived in Japan. Over the next sixty years the mission managed to convert more than 300,000 Japanese to their belief, including some of the most powerful people in the country. But in the process they made enemies too, and in 1614 a nationwide ban was issued, followed by a vicious campaign of persecution. A religion that preached against the workings of evil was itself denounced as evil. Because it threatened the power of the shogun, torture and executions were used against believers as the authorities grew increasingly determined to make them recant. Over 4,000 people are known to have died for their faith, and thousands of others suffered misery and ruination. In 1639 the country was sealed to prevent “contagion” from the outside, and by the end of the next decade it seemed the religion had been eradicated from the country.

For over two hundred years Japan remained a closed society, except for Chinese traders and a handful of Dutch at Nagasaki. Only in 1854 was it prised open again. Eleven years later came an astonishing revelation: groups of villagers, mostly illiterate, had continued to practice Christianity in secret despite all the preventative measures put in place. For seven generations they had passed the religion down to their children despite having no Bible, no priests, and no sacraments except for baptism. Isolated and imperiled, they clung to their faith, and the result was often unorthodox. Remarkably, even after the toleration of Christianity, about half refused to rejoin the Catholic Church and carried on with the rituals and prayers taught to them as children. Some of their descendants still do.

On the other side of the world, a curious parallel to the Hidden Christians could be found in the secret Jews of the Iberian Peninsula. Ironically, Christians were doing the persecuting rather than being persecuted, and it was happening in the very countries from which the missionaries had left for Japan. When the Jews were ordered to convert to Catholicism or be expelled in 1492, it’s thought that up to 200,000 subsequently became Marranos—Christian converts who were secret practitioners of Judaism. Some of the families continued the practice into modern times, and a documentary entitled The Last Marranos was made as late as 1997.

Like the Marranos, the Hidden Christians are bound up with issues that extend beyond religion to race and identity. In Japan’s case, it had much to do with the clash of East and West, for the Confucian and Socratic traditions had produced different ways of thinking that were compounded by the contrast between East Asian polytheism and Christian monotheism. What happened when representatives of the two cultures first met? Having spent the greater part of my adult life in Japan, I was naturally intrigued by the question, and my interest was fueled by reading Endo Shusaku’s compelling novel, Silence (1966). When I learned of the tenacity with which Japanese peasants had clung to the European faith, I couldn’t help wondering what had motivated them to risk death and the ruination of their loved ones. In unpacking the answer to that question, I had the feeling that I would be picking at the very essence of the culture.

The coming of the missionaries to Japan has much in common with the spread of early Christianity. When Paul arrived in Corinth, there were well-established pagan deities and a huge temple to Apollo, the Sun God. When Francis Xavier arrived in Japan, there was not only a well-established religion in Buddhism but an array of native deities headed by Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess. Paul traveled around the Aegean, setting up groups that met in private houses and to whom he addressed long letters. Xavier and his fellow missionaries did much the same thing, writing long reports on their activities back to Rome. In both cases the religion won a following by offering dignity to the dispossessed and salvation in a world to come. For societies in which most of the population was downtrodden and desperate, the message of spiritual equality proved liberating.

For those in power, the message was anything but liberating: it was threatening. In Rome believers refused to participate in pagan festivities or public sacrifices to the emperor. In Japan allegiance to the Church clashed with allegiance to the shogun. In both cases the religion came to be seen as subversive, resulting in persecution and crucifixion. One vital difference was the conversion of Constantine in the early fourth century, following which Christianity was able to flourish. Japan too almost had its Constantine moment, but when it failed to materialize, things developed in a very different direction and Hidden Christians became the faith’s last refuge.

In mulling over why they had risked so much for an imported faith, I came to see the Hidden Christians in terms of a mirror image. Here was I, a European interested in Japanese spirituality: they on the other hand were Japanese attracted to a European religion. As I came to “reflect” on the nature of the mirror, I felt a compulsion to see for myself the cutting edge of the culture clash that had taken place. In this way I would surely come to understand more fully the country in which I had chosen to make my home. In short, I was hoping to do more than uncover Hidden Christians: I was hoping to journey deeper into Japan, past and present.

But if I was to go in search of Hidden Christians, it had to be done soon, for surviving practitioners were few in number. Writing in 2003, Miyazaki Kentaro estimated that there were only 1,000 to 1,500 practitioners left, most of whom were elderly. Because of a lack of interest by the younger generation, there was no fresh blood and baptisms had all but stopped. Clearly, there was little time to waste, but where was I to start? The obvious answer was at the very beginning, and so one fine day in 2010 I set out from my home in Kyoto for a faraway island of which I knew nothing. Like all good stories, the encounter of East and West had started with a chance happening.”

~ John Doughill, In Search of Japan's Hidden Christians: A Story of Suppression, Secrecy and Survival
“Kakure Kirishitan (lit. '"hidden Christian"') is a modern term for a member of the Japanese Catholic Church during the Edo period that went underground after the Shimabara Rebellion in the 1630s. Kakure Kirishitans are called the "hidden" Christians because they continued to practice Christianity in secret. They worshipped in secret rooms in private homes. As time went on, the figures of the saints and the Virgin Mary were transformed into figurines that looked like the traditional statues of the Buddha and bodhisattvas; depictions of Mary modeled on the Buddhist deity Kannon, goddess of mercy, became common, and were known as "Maria Kannon". The prayers were adapted to sound like Buddhist chant, yet retained many untranslated words from Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish. The Bible and other parts of the liturgy were passed down orally, because printed works could be confiscated by authorities. Because of the official expulsion of the Catholic clergy in the 17th century, the Kakure Christian community relied on lay leaders to lead the services.

In some cases, the communities drifted away from Christian teachings. They lost the meaning of the prayers and their religion became a version of the cult of ancestors, in which the ancestors happened to be their Christian martyrs.
Kakure Kirishitan was recognized by Bernard Petitjean, a Catholic priest, when Ōura Church was built in Nagasaki in 1865. Approximately 30,000 secret Christians, some of whom had adopted these new ways of practicing Christianity, came out of hiding when religious freedom was re-established in 1873 after the Meiji Restoration. The Kakure Kirishitan became known as Mukashi Kirishitan, or "ancient" Christians, and emerged not only from traditional Christian areas in Kyushu, but also from other rural areas of Japan. The majority of Kakure Kirishitan rejoined the Catholic Church after renouncing unorthodox, syncretic practices. Some Kakure Kirishitan did not rejoin the Catholic Church, and became known as the Hanare Kirishitan (separated Christians).  Hanare Kirishitan are now primarily found in Urakami and on the Gotō Islands.

Following the legalization of Christianity and secularization of Japan, many Hanare Kirishitan lineages ended abruptly. Traditionally, boys learned the rituals and prayers from their fathers; when boys were uninterested or moved away from the homes, there would be no one left to continue the lineage. For a while, Hanare Kirishitans were thought to have died out entirely, due to their secretive nature. A group on Ikitsuki Island in Nagasaki Prefecture, which had been overlooked by the Japanese government during all of these times, made their practices public in the 1980s and now perform them for audiences; however, these practices have acquired some attributes of theatre, such as the telling of folktales and the use of statues and other images which most underground Christians had never created.

The anthropologist Christal Whelan uncovered some Hanare Kirishitans on the Gotō Islands where Kakure Kirishitans had once fled. There were only two surviving priests on the islands, both of whom were over 90, and they would not talk to each other. The few surviving laity had also all reached old age, and some of them no longer had any priests from their lineage and prayed alone. Although these Hanare Kirishitans had a strong tradition of secrecy, they agreed to be filmed for her documentary Otaiya.” ~ Wikipedia

Photos ~ The Virgin Mary disguised as Kannon, Kirishitan cult, 17th-century Japan. Salle des Martyrs, Paris Foreign Missions Society.
~ A Dehua porcelain "Guanyin bringing child" statue, interpreted to be "Maria Kannon" in connection with Christian worship. Nantoyōsō Collection, Japan.
~ The gion-mamori, crest of the Gion Shrine, was adopted by the kakure kirishitan as their crest under the Tokugawa shogunate.