THE HIDDEN CATHOLICS OF JAPAN - THE JESUITS AND THEIR LEGACY
THE HIDDEN CATHOLICS OF JAPAN
THE JESUITS AND THEIR LEGACY
"Arrival of a Portuguese Ship".
On St Patrick’s Day 1865, Father Bernard Petitjean, a priest of the Societe des Missions Etrangeres, was in the chapel he had constructed and dedicated to the Japanese martyrs in Nagasaki, Japan, when he was visited by a group of Japanese men and women. From the time of his arrival in Japan until that day in March 1865, Father Petitjean had had no visitors.
At that time in Japan, during the Meiji Restoration, foreigners had been granted access to the country after two centuries of isolation. However, all contact by native Japanese with foreigners, especially missionaries, was strictly forbidden under threat of execution - conversion by a Japanese to Christianity was a capital offense and even a conversation with a priest was illegal.
“But here, standing before him are these 15 people, looking very frightened and not a little unsure of themselves . . .”
An article in the Japan Times, by Michael Hoffman, summarized the occasion of this first encounter of a French Catholic priest with the hidden Catholics of Japan, descendants of those men and women who had given their lives for the faith 250 years before and who had, incredibly, practised the faith in secret, handing down the received knowledge from generation to generation. The moment of that encounter, portrayed by Mr Hoffman, had been vividly captured by Father Jacques Monet in a series, “Great Moments in Catholic History,”(1)
“Then a young man speaks up. His name is Peter. He is a catechist, he says timidly, and wonders whether Fr. Petitjean owes allegiance to ‘the great chief of the Kingdom of Rome.’ The missionary answers that the Vicar of Christ, Pope Pius IX, will be very happy to learn of their interest.
“Peter, however, wants to make sure he has been understood. He asks, ‘Have you no children?’ ‘You and all your brethren,’ answers the missionary, ‘Christians and others, are the children whom God has given me. Other children I cannot have. The priest must, like the first apostles of Japan, remain all his life unmarried.’
At this, Peter and his friends bend their heads down to the ground and cry out: ‘He is celibate! Thank God.’ (2)
According to Meg Hunter-Kilmer in a commentary on the event (3);
“Father Petitjean asked of a middle aged woman, “Where are you from?”
“From Urakami” she said, naming a village only a few miles off. “There almost all have the same heart.” Then she asked, “Where is the Santa Maria?”
“Father Petitjean was stunned. This woman knew the Blessed Mother. She was looking for a statue. Could it possibly be? ….
“He led them to a statue of Our Lady, where the group knelt in prayer. Soon though, they were surrounding him, with a series of very important questions. Did he follow the ruler in Rome? Did he have children?
On hearing his answers the group was elated: they had waited 250 years and finally their priests had come back to them! They wept as they knelt before that statue. “(4)
Michael Hoffman observed:
“’Peter’ and his friends were the first evidence of an astonishing historical fact. More than 200 years earlier, Japan’s thriving Christianity had been outlawed, its adherents tortured and slaughtered by the tens of thousands. So determined was the new Tokugawa Shogunate to protect its subjects from the ‘evil doctrine’ that, having bloodily suppressed a Christian and peasant uprising at Shimabara in 1638, it built a virtual wall around the entire country.
Fr. Petitjean was among the first wave of foreigners to arrive after the forced entry effected by U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry in 1854. For two centuries before, in hamlets and remote islands off western Kyushu, little communities of Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians), some 30,000 individuals altogether, without priests or religious instruction — “without any other sacrament than baptism and marriage,” as Monet puts it — had persisted in their Christian faith. Monet calls it “one of the most extraordinary acts of preserving faith in the long history of the Church.” Pope Pius called it a miracle.”(5)
On 15 August 1549 the Jesuit fathers Francis Xavier, Cosme de Torres and Juan Fernandez had arrived in Kagoshima from Spain. In September of that year, Father Xavier had visited the Daimyo of Kagoshima, asking permission to build a Catholic mission in Japan. The Daimyo agreed in the hope of creating a trade relationship with Europe. The Shogunate and imperial government initially supported the Catholic mission and missionaries, thinking they would reduce the influence of the Buddhist monks and help trade with Spain and Portugal.
This situation, however, changed as Toyotomi Hideyoshi became Shogun in a more unified Japan. Shogun Hideyoshi had gained power from humble beginnings by ruthless violence, defeating all opposition in a pitiless campaign. The Christian missionaries, with their western values, were viewed with suspicion as empowering possibly rebellious elements within the community. In 1587 Hiyedoshi banned the Jesuit missionaries, repressing Christianity as a threat to national unity.
Then, in 1597, a Spanish ship, the San Felipe, ran aground in a cyclone off the Japanese coast, with ship and cargo intact. By Japanese custom, the local Daimyo was under a duty to provide succour for the crew but was permitted to keep the cargo. The ship’s captain resisted the claim of cargo by the Daimyo by threatening him with an invasion by the Spanish army, which would, he claimed, make Japan a colony. The incident was relayed to the Shogun, Hideyoshi, following which anti-Christian advisers convinced him that the missionaries were acting as fifth columnists. Twenty-six Catholic missionaries, including Franciscans and some Jesuits, were crucified on 5th February 1597.
Catholics in Japan were then subjected to a program of terror with public executions in Nagasaki, where Catholics were numerous. They had their ears sliced off and were then driven around Kyoto in open carts, following which they were fastened to a cross as a mockery of the Christian faith. The Shogun declared the Shinto religion the religion of Japan as a mechanism of unification of the war-torn country. In 1614 he banned Christianity, expelled all missionaries and renewed the persecution of Catholics. (6)
In the 1620’s Christians who were hiding in and around Nagasaki were arrested and executed. “Catholics who did not renounce their faith were crucified, dismembered, lowered head first into excrement or suffered other cruel means of torture and death. Thousands took their faith underground. In order to practice their faith without detection, they eliminated most symbols and books, disguising their rituals and committing prayers and scripture to memory.” (7)
In 1637 Christian peasants in Shimabara and Amakusa rose up in revolt. The Tokugawa shogunate had a difficult time suppressing the revolt and renewed the persecution. They were repeatedly and gruesomely repressed throughout the following 250 years. After this time, Christianity ceased to exist publicly in Japan. As became apparent to Father Petitjean, however, it continued to exist as an underground faith, evolving into different manifestations according to the cultural surrounds.
Yoku Shimizu, Senior Assistant Professor at the School of Arts and Letters, Meiji University, in an article on the Hidden Catholics, “What we cannot restore and the Hidden Christians did not lose for 250 years”, observed:
“Unlike Protestants, Catholics do not give out the Bible to believers. Basically Christian doctrine is taught by priests in their preaching. This means believers had no way to learn without priests. For this reason, some Christians drifted away from orthodox practice of Catholicism due to Syncretism, the joining of Christianity to Shintoism or Buddhism.”(7A)
Michael Hoffman illustrated this divergence in his description of the Kakure Kirishitan, a blend of Shinto and Buddhist observances which were initially practice as camouflage, to deceive the authorities, coupled with Latin prayers “whose distortions as they were handed down in secret from generation to generation acquired, in the minds of worshipers, a sacred character of their own.” (9)
“I have a Buddhist altar and Shinto shrine in my house,” Kakure pastor Tomeichi Oka told the New York Times in 1997. “In the old days that was just for camouflage . . . but now I believe in the other gods as well.” And his congregation on tiny Ikitsuki Island off Nagasaki would pray, for example, “Ame Maria karassa binno domisu terikobintsu . . . “ — in which Catholics will discern an echo of “Ave Maria gratia plena dominus tecum benedicta.’’ (10)
The ceremony of Otaiya, (“big evening”), a Kakure Kirishitan celebration of Christmas Eve, consists of the blessing of sake and rice, the sake being consumed and the rice placed in the palm of the hands of the congregation. (11)
They celebrate the Crucifixion but Easter is seen merely as a time when the mourning ceases, (ie., not with the significance of the Resurrection). They celebrate the Feast Day of Our Lady of Snows, and some minor feast days. They passed down prayers through the generations completely orally, originally taken from the printed 16th century Portuguese Latin and Japanese texts left by the missionaries, but of which the present-day priests and faithful have no knowledge, their knowledge of the prayers deriving from oral transmission. They include the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Salve Regina and other standards. (12)
Professor Shimizu stated, however:
“The situation in Nagasaki was different – syncretism did not occur in the Nagasaki region. The population of the town was about 25,000 all of whom were Christians. The town was called ”Little Rome.” There were many missionaries and the system was well developed.”
The hidden Catholics from Urakami who confessed their faith to Father Petitjean presented him with some religious books. Three books were titled “Konchirisan no Riyaku” (“the Power of Contrition”); “Luzon no Orasho” (“Prayers of Luzon”); and Tenji Hajimari no Koto” (The Beginning of Heaven and Earth”).
The power of Contrition (“Konchirisan no Riyaku”) was published by a Portuguese missionary in 1603, prior to the ban on Christianity. The hidden Catholics in Urakami passed this book down to believers. The contents of the book were memorized by the believers and recited by them. It addressed the sacrament of confession and the forgiveness of sins through contrition. The book explained that, under normal circumstances, absolution is given by the priest. However, the book gave methods of prayer so as to reach and express contrition in the absence of a priest.
Professor Shimizu stated that a survey conducted during the Taisho period (1912-1926), revealed that hidden Catholics in Urakami, aged at that time between 70-80 years old, who were born in the Edo Period, (1603-1867), were able to recite the book perfectly. Succeeding generations had recited the doctrine in the books by way of oral history for 250 years after the ban on Christianity.
The second book, “Tenji Hajimari no Koto”, (“The Beginning of Heaven and Earth”) consisted of Bible stories transcribed from oral instruction (from memory), of believers in 1822-1823. These Bible stories too, had been handed down orally. Yet, Professor Shimizu describes the book as depicting “many Biblical stories, from the creation of heaven and earth by “Tentei” (God), to the life of Jesus, “including that “Onmi” (Jesus), was born of “Maruya” (Mary), His ascension by “Hatamono” (crucifixion), the end of the world and the Last Judgment.” (12)
Father Petitjean observed that the religious life of the people with whom he came into contact was expressed in ritual sacramental observance – self-baptism, prayers and penance.
Professor Shimizu stated that, “Those hidden Christians from Urakami confessed to the missionary Petitjean that the hearts of all of us here are the same as yours.” This fact implies that they did not see Father Petitjean as just a foreigner, but knew he was a missionary of the Catholic church where Christ was acknowledged as Head, and were aware that they were part of this Christian community. (14)
'Tens of thousands of hidden Christians came out of the woodwork after that remarkable 1865 encounter in Nagasaki. These people weren’t supposed to exist, and yet here they were, telling stories of secret baptisms and Marian images made to look like Buddhist goddesses. They recited ‘Latin’ prayers that were barely intelligible to the western priests and sang hymns modelled on Buddhist chants as another layer of camouflage.
But they had appointed men as catechists, men to baptize and serve in a pastoral role, and others to keep the calendar. They abstained from meat on Fridays, observed Lent and Easter, even attempted to celebrate feast days. As best they could, they gave their children saints’ names. Many had resigned themselves to the need to deny their faith publicly, but they prayed acts of contrition, again and again, longing for the day when they would once again be able to receive sacramental absolution.
They knew the priests would return. They knew because the missionaries had promised, and they knew because a martyr named Bastian had prophesied in 1660 that after seven more generations, confessors would return to Japan. So they counted down the years until that fateful day in 1865 (seven generations later) when Father Petitjean received them at the church named for their ancestors.” (15)
Fr. Petitjean encouraged the Kakure Kirishitan of Urakami to practice their faith openly, which was, unfortunately a bad idea - 3,400 were arrested, tortured and 36 were executed.
It was only in 1873, under intense foreign pressure, that the anti-Christian edict was repealed and a new Constitution in 1889 granted religious freedom. Even so, however, Kakure Kirishitan forms of worship persisted, surviving to this day. (16)
(1) published in 1983 in The Catholic Register; see Michael Hoffman, Japan Times: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/.../japans-hidden-christians/
(2) ibid.
(3) “Lessons to be learned from the Hidden Christians of Japan”, Meg Hunter-Kilmer, Our Sunday Visitor.
(4) ibid.
(5) Michael Hoffman, ibid.
(6) Father Paul McGlynn, “Japanese samurai who remained rock solid for Christ’ Beatified”.
(7) “Kakure Kirishitan” Patrick Downes Catholic Education Resource Centre;
(7A)Yoku Shimizu, “What we cannot restore and the Hidden Christians did not lose for 250 years”, Meiji University.
(9) Michael Hoffman, ibid.
(10) ibid.
(11) Patrick Downes, “Kakure Kirishitan”, ibid.
(12) ibid.
(13) Yoku Shimizu, ibid.
(14) ibid.
(15) Meg Hunter-Kilmer, ibid.
(16) Patrick Downes, ibid.
Image: "Arrival of a Portuguese Ship", https://www.khanacademy.org/.../arrival-of-a-portuguese-ship
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