Posted on Tuesday 7 March 2006

Christianity was first introduced into Japan with the arrival of Jesuit missionaries at Kagoshima in 1549. It thrived for a time and the Jesuits enjoyed some influence in the court of the daimyo of Nagasaki who was baptised in 1563. At their peak, the Jesuits were able to claim upwards of 200,000 converts to the Christian faith.

The authorities in Edo (Tokyo) viewed these developments with concern. Initially they allowed the Portuguese access to the southern ports for trade but Jesuit activity and the spread of this foreign religion came to be seen as a threat to national unity. This was exacerbated by the sometimes disrespectful and insolent behaviour of certain priests towards the beliefs and practices of the established religions of Japan. Christianity by its very nature resisted the kind of syncretism and melding of traditions that had characterised Japanese religion. The Edo authorities also viewed with suspicion any social movement that might possibly inspire insurrection in the notoriously fractious and rebellious south west.

The first anti-Christian edict ordering all missionaries to the leave the country was issued in 1587. While this was generally ignored it was followed by a series of bans and proscriptions culminating in a national ban on the religion in 1614 and a total suppression after the Shimabara uprising in 1638. Christians now routinely faced torture or death for practising their religion and many abandoned it and returned to the officially sanctioned religions of Buddhism and Shintoism. But a sizable remnant took the religion underground and continued to secretly practice it whilst enshrouding it with the superficial trappings of other faiths. This group became known as kakure kirishitan or the "hidden Christians".


After Commodore Matthew Perry used gun boat diplomacy to force the Tokugawa shogunate in Edo to open its doors to trade, it was revealed that even after two hundred years of suppression there were still tens of thousands of practising Christians in Japan. Many of the rites and rituals which had been taught to them by St. Francis Xavier and the other Jesuit missionaries were still in use but having been transmitted as an oral tradition they survived only in a highly mutated form. While many Japanese Christians returned to the mainstream Catholic church after the religion was legalised in 1873, many others preferred to stay with their secret rituals which they performed in their hidden temples and private homes just as their ancestors did.

It is thought that only a few hundred kakure kirishitan remain today scattered in remote locations across Nagasaki prefecture. Most of them are now very old. On the island of Ikitsuki, the inhabitants have preserved a collection of 29 prayers which they call orasho (after the Latin word for prayer, oratio). Long ago the meaning of the recited words was lost and what remains is a chant made up of an amalgam of Latin, Portuguese, Japanese and a number of undecipherable or made up words.

Deusupaitero, hīryō, superitosantono,
Wareraga dēusu, santakurosuno onshirushio motte,
wareraga tekio nogashitamiya.
Deusupātero, hīriyo, superitosantono minaomotte,
tanomitatematsuru, anmeizō.

In the 1820s a bible was compiled which drew entirely from the collective memory of the kakure kirishitan. The book tells us

...for example, of the young Holy One debating with Buddhist priests, as 12-year-old Jesus was said to have done with the Jewish elders. Two men, Ponsha and Piroto (ie, Pontius Pilate), are told to kill all children of five and under, an echo of Herod's order. Mary gives birth in a stable, but the innkeeper who had spurned her then takes her in: in a wonderfully Japanese touch, he offers her a hot bath.

See also:

Catholic Educator's Resource Center : Kakure Kirishtan
CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Japanese Martyrs
A timeline of Christianity In Japan

[1] The Japanese camera company Canon takes its name from this Japanese rendering of Kuan Yin.