Japan's Hidden Christians

The French Mission first came into contact with Hidden Christian groups in the 1860s. They observed, writes Crystal Whelan, that different communities used varying names about themselves: Kirishitan, Bateren, or Dogio, depending on whether their original teachers were from Franciscan, Jesuit, or Dominican orders. Tagita Kōya is one of the foremost twentieth century writers and anthropologists of the Hidden Christians in Japan. He wrote in 1958 that the Kakure Kirishitan themselves should be separated into at least two types: the first, previously known as Moto-Kirishitan 元キリシタン, those who live in Hirado and Ikitsuki and tended to focus on the preservation and use of nandogami 納戸神, or "closet-gods" within their Shinto and Buddhist altars; the second, relevant to this project, are those Kakure Kirishitan who lived in Nagasaki, Kurosaki, and the Gotō Islands, and whose focus in their daily practice is on higuri-chō 日繰帳 books. In these communities, there were no "closet-gods" and the "notebook" indicated by chō 帳 was commonly a church calendar called Bastian no reki バスティアンの暦. In Kakimori's interview within this project he explains the use of the calendar such as this one for remembering "Saints Days," Otaiya お大夜 (Christmas), or Kanashimi no Agari 悲しみの上がり (Easter).

On the Upper Gotō, Tagita wrote, Hidden Christian groups were called furu-chō 古帳, and in the central (most likely Naru Island) region they were called moto-chō 元帳. Tagita's explanation helps to show how if you had traveled to Nagasaki Prefecture in the 1950s and moved between Hirado, the Gotō, and Nagasaki City, or Sotome, you would have been able to identify Hidden Christians by their language and customs, but even these varied from place to place and region to region. Tagita additionally suggests that orashio (prayers) commonly did not originate from Christianity in the Gotō Islands.

More recently, Japanese historian and religious scholar Miyazaki Kentarō has written that the Kakure Kirishitan (who did not become Catholic in the formal, Western sense with the return of missionaries in the nineteenth century) "can or will not become Catholic" as "their faith became Japanese through and through, mixing with the traditional religions of Japan and thus became estranged from Christianity." However, the new research presented in this project offers evidence that reaffirms more recent positions that a dynamism between Kakure and Roman Catholic continues to today. Take, for example, our interviewees Kakimori Kazutoshi or Urakami Sachiko, whose ancestors were Kakure but who have recently returned to Catholicism. There is no doubt that there have been long-term fractures between some Hidden Christian and Catholic communities, but those Hidden Christian communities that remain on the islands to this day are located geographically nearby Roman Catholic communities and some have chosen to participate in their congregations or even ask for Roman Catholic last rites (See Kakimori interview).

The Jesuit missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries hoped that their considerable investment in reaching the ruling classes would exert an impact on a potential Christian future in Japan. Despite this, it was primarily commoners who took their faith underground from the early 1600s and managed to effectively transmit it over generations. These communities maintained subversive, secret societies throughout the two hundred and fifty years or so of the Tokugawa period (1603-1868) and emerged once more to religious freedom in the Meiji period (1868-1912) after a largely samurai class vision of a Japanese empire dawned. My focus in this oral history project is this emergence of Catholics and Kakure Kirishitan from these previous persecutions. In the interviews I mainly examine peoples' experiences after the arrival of the French mission, MEP (Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris), in Nagasaki in the 1860s.

Historian Kataoka Yakichi writes that one major reason for the ongoing survival of underground Christian groups was the geography of the Sotome region north of Nagasaki, where the mountains "drop into" the sea, the available land is narrow, and the transport inconvenient, giving the communities ways of hiding their practices. Dorothea Filus adds that Sotome had more contact with missionaries over the century of Christian presence and so the "Catholic flavor of the [Hidden Christian] religion in Sotome, compared to other parts of Kyushu, is evident…"

The migration of the Kirishitan from the Sotome region (See Glimpse into the Gotō in History) had a particularly strong influence on Hidden Christian history. In the late eighteenth century, the Sotome region, north of Nagasaki, was perceived as overpopulated and without enough to eat, whereas on the Gotō Islands there was open space. In order to manage the population, the daimyo of Omura Domain ordered that only the first born son was to be raised by each family–in other words, the peasants in the domain were required to commit infanticide should they have any subsequent sons. This was a considerable push factor that led to migrations of Kirishitan, while the daimyo of Gotō Domain gave permission for at least some of the arrivals. On the Gotō Islands the main authorities who later carried out persecutions during the 1860s and 1870s were the Gotō and the Hirado Domains, supported by their samurai ashigaru 足軽 (foot soldiers) and yakunin 役人 officials.

The oppression faced by Hidden Christian communities is far from limited to the better-known early modern encounters with Portuguese and Spanish missionaries and their adversaries. Many different sources attest to the challenges faced by Hidden Christians as they transformed into Catholic, Kakure (Hanare), or even Buddhist/Shinto communities. For example, the recent book Ikinuke Sono Hi No Tame Ni : Nagasaki No Hisabetsu Buraku to Kirishitan (Survival for the sake of "that day": Nagasaki's outcast community and the Christians) by Takayama Fumihiko discusses the true experience of the so-called burakumin 部落民 communities descended from outcast peoples known as eta 穢多 (lit. "abundance of filth") or hinin 非人 (lit. "non-human"). It describes how a man called Nakao Kan who grew up in the small Urakami burakumin community went to the Gotō Islands to be a teacher and was surprised by the discrimination he observed. Nakao moved to the islands in April 1950 and consequently spent nine years there, for much of the time in a Hidden Christian community, although Takayama is ambivalent about whether this community is actually a Kakure community or whether they are Catholic. He mentions that they were reading the Bible, a well-thumbed New Testament, which would appear to identify them as Catholic. What is striking in Nakao's narrative, however, is that he says the children he teaches from this community were suffering worse discrimination than he did as a child in the buraku in Urakami.

この子らは、あのころの自分たちのように差別をうけているのかもしれない。いや、もっとひどい差別をうけているのかもしれない。
These children were being discriminated against like what we experienced as children. No, it is likely worse discrimination than what we experienced.

The descendants of Senpuku Kirishitan are a diverse group even today. Some are continuing Roman Catholics following their ancestors' encounter with the French mission of the nineteenth century, some have more recently become Roman Catholic, and some are either nominal or practicing Kakure (Hidden Christian). Others alternatively identify as or practice both Buddhism and/or Shinto, or identify as having no religion.

Japanese Translation: Nobuko Sakatani & Satsuki Oosaki