Japanese Whispers
Posted on Tuesday 7 March 2006 to unknown
"Big Evening" Christmas eve. In a ceremony reminiscent of the Eucharist,
a priest places a ball of rice in the palm of another priest .
Image by Christal
Whelan.
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".
Maria-Kannon: The Virgin Mary portrayed in the form of the
bodhisattva Kuan Yin
who is known in Japan as Kannon [1].
In Chinese and Japanese Buddhism,
Kuan Yin is a deity of compassion and mercy and is often depicted with
small children who serve as her assistants. These children can at times be impish and mischievous and one of them "Red Boy" caused Sun Wukong (aka Monkey) quite a lot of trouble in the Chinese novel A Journey to the West.
In the above image, the child depicted is really the infant Jesus Christ.
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, h?ry?, superitosantono,
Wareraga d?usu, santakurosuno onshirushio motte,
wareraga tekio nogashitamiya.
Deusup?tero, h?riyo, superitosantono minaomotte,
tanomitatematsuru, anmeiz?.
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.
