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In Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel Silence, the apostatised priest Cristóvão Ferreira tells a Portuguese compatriot a bitter truth about Japanese Christianity. “The Japanese till this day have never had the concept of God,” he proclaims, “and they never will.” For a book set in the 17th century, it’s a fair point. Wary of colonisation by Western powers, the ruling shogunate banned Christianity in 1614, a policy aimed at isolating Japan from the rest of the world. As for those Japanese Catholics who remained, many were tortured and killed, with some crucified in an ironic play on the fate of their saviour.
In a sense, Ferreira’s argument remains true today. Barely 1% of Japanese people now identify as Christian, and if you asked the average Tokyo commuter to explain the Eucharist, they’d likely just stare. Yet if Japan is unique among the East Asian countries for remaining almost devoid of Christians, this is also a society where people wear their faith lightly, and where Buddhism and Shintoism have coexisted for centuries. That surely explains why modern Japanese now wallow in the symbols and traditions of Christmas, even as they twist outside customs to their needs. No less striking, those few Japanese who do embrace Jesus tend to do remarkably well — hinting at its long associations with Western sophistication.
Much as Catholicism is the assumed religion of every Italian — a faith, at the very least, to be embraced at birth, marriage and death — Buddhism and Shintoism in Japan are chiefly cultural institutions. The typical Japanese will visit a temple or shrine at the beginning of the new year out of tradition, and get married in one, but whether or not they literally believe in gods or spirits is harder to answer. When it comes to the God of the Western monotheistic religions, in fact, most Japanese would likely be considered agnostic. Given how different the Japanese attitude to faith is from Western monotheism — original sin and scriptural dogma are unknown — Shusaku Endo may have had a point when he wrote that his fellow countrymen “cannot think of an existence that transcends the human.”
Yet ever since the Portuguese arrived during the Age of Discovery, there have always been Christians here. The first mass on Japanese soil is said to have occurred in 1552, at the behest of Jesuits based at Yamaguchi. The Portuguese had landed in the Land of the Rising Sun less than a decade prior, being the first Europeans to do so. Francis Xavier led the first Christian mission to Japan in 1549, with his successors to learning Japanese and converting as many natives as possible. Prefectures like Yamaguchi and Nagasaki still have the highest concentrations of Christians in Japan — partly because of the work of these hardy Catholic pioneers.
It’s debatable how many of these early Japanese Christians actually understood Christianity: most initially interpreted the religion as simply another sect of Buddhism. During his early proselytising, in fact, Xavier used “Dainichi” (“Great Sun”) as a Japanese translation for the Christian God, borrowing the name of a major Buddha. Yet if this subtle approach led to the conversation of several high-ranking daimyo (lords), with aristocrats keen to embrace the faith of the prosperous and musket-wielding outsiders, it also pushed the shogunate to crush Christianity and expel all foreigners from the country.
The artificial island Dejima, off Nagasaki, was the only port where Dutch traders were permitted to do business, and they skirted the ban on Christianity by framing their Christmas celebrations as marking the New Year. Some high-ranking Japanese officials occasionally attended these “Dutch New Year” festivities. Their European hosts did their best under the circumstances, cooking lavish feasts including sweet bread and pies, both unusual sights when the journey back to Amsterdam took six months.
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Subscribe” asked the average Tokyo commuter to explain the Eucharist, they’d likely just stare” whereas, of course, if you asked the average London commuter, or me, the answer would be hugely different!
The writer forgot to mention a large amount of Japanese Christians who are known as Makuya..& are ardent supporters of Israel
Thanks for that. I hadn’t heard of this movement, which (having googled) seems to be an attempt to celebrate the Christian kerygma in an authentically Japanese (and even Buddhist) cultural matrix independent of the Hellenistic framework which we are used to in the West (where ‘West’ here includes Eastern Orthodoxy). And they are realistic enough to realise that while the traditional Greek articulation/interpretation of the gospel is not essential to it, its Jewish origins certainly are. Very interesting.
Booking tables at the KFC. Something about that makes me smile.
Yes, the KFC thing is really true.