Veil
(Japan Times, Dec. 2007)
"It is 12:30 at noon in Nagasaki, on March 17, 1865. Father Bernard Petitjean, a priest of the French Societe des Missions Etrangeres, hears a noise at the back door of his little chapel. On opening he is surprised to find a group of 15 middle-aged Japanese men and women -- surprised because all native-born subjects of the Mikado are strictly forbidden to associate with Christians and his chapel has been declared to be reserved only for foreigners. "
So begins Part 17 of a series entitled "Great Moments in Catholic History," published in 1983 in a journal called The Catholic Register. The article's author is Fr. Jacques Monet, S.J., who so vividly captures the emotional intensity of this charged moment that we will follow him a little further.
"Until now [Father Petitjean] has had no visitors. But here, standing before him are these 15 people, looking very frightened and not a little unsure of themselves....
"Then a young man speaks up. His name is Peter. He is a catechist, he says timidly, and wonders whether Father 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, 'Christian 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.' Then they mention their village [Urakami, north of Nagasaki]: 'At home, everybody is the same as we are. They have the same hearts as we.'"
"Peter" and his friends were the first evidence of an astonishing historical fact. Japan's nascent and thriving Christianity had more than 200 years earlier been uprooted and banned, its adherents tortured and slaughtered by the tens of thousands, its foreign missionaries barred from entering the country. 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. Father Petitjean was among the first wave of foreigners arriving in the wake of the forced entry effected in 1854 by the American commodore Matthew Perry. And yet all that time, through two centuries of near-total national isolation, in tiny hamlets and remote islands of western Kyushu, their existence scarcely suspected by the authorities, 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.
***
The Kakure Kirishitan worship that took shape over centuries is a weird blend: Shinto and Buddhist observances initially intended to deceive the authorities, mixed with dimly remembered Latin prayers whose accumulated distortions as they were handed down in secret from generation to generation of illiterate peasants acquired, in the minds of worshipers, a sacred character of their own.
"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, because our Christianity was hidden, 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 Orthodox Catholics will discern an echo of "Ave Maria gratia plena dominus tecum benedicta."
Father Petitjean encouraged the Kakure Kirishitan of Urakami to practice their faith openly. This was premature. Christianity was still an outlawed religion, and Petitjean's new flock paid a harsh price for his enthusiasm: 3400 were arrested, some of them tortured, 36 put to death. It was only in 1873 that, under intense foreign pressure, the anti-Christian edict became a dead letter. In 1889 a new Constitution granted religious freedom.
The survival of Kakure forms of worship beyond any need for concealment (they persist to this day, most notably in the Goto Islands of western Kyushu) is a fact worth contemplating for what it tells us about the nature of the evolution of religious ritual.
"The missionaries' initial assumption," writes theologian Stephen Turnbull in "The Kakure Kirishitan of Japan," "had been that reconciliation with and reacceptance into the Church was the sole desire." Not so. Half the Kakure stood firm in defense of their own ways.
"To the underground Christians who rejoined the Catholic Church," Turnbull continues, "any differences in doctrine or ritual were drawn to their attention and labeled errors, which, in their zeal for instruction, they proved ready to abandon, thereby rejecting a belief system that the foreign priests suspected had already moved far from Christianity. To those who chose not to rejoin, their beliefs and rituals represented the truth with which they had been entrusted."
***
Up to this point in the story Japanese Christianity is, in however altered a form, Catholic Christianity. Protestantism's first inroads were part and parcel of the forced opening of the country in the mid-19th century. The early success of the mostly American Protestant missionaries owed much to their status as teachers of the "Western" knowledge Japan, following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, was suddenly so eager to acquire.
It also owed more than a passing nod to Confucius.
In an essay entitled "The First Generation," theologian Akio Doi introduces several Meiji-era Christian thinkers whose earliest childhood education, soon to be discredited by the changing times, had taught them that the highest thing in life was to serve and be prepared to die for your feudal lord.
They had much in common, these early Japanese Protestants. All were of warrior stock, steeped in the samurai and Confucian ethics of loyalty, filial piety and self-sacrifice. All were, in a sense, looking for a new lord to serve, a new "father" to receive their reverence. And all saw in Christianity not a repudiation of their old beliefs but a purification and completion of them.
Danjo Ebina (1866-1937) was born in Northern Kyushu and entered the Kumamoto Western School as a child of six. There, under the influence of an American Protestant missionary teacher, "he came to feel," writes Doi, "the working of a God who created and ruled everything.... Having lost a lord to serve, he had been living a self-centered life. Now he realized that he was to serve God, the Creator of all. For him, God was his lord and he was His subject..."
Later, as a student at the Protestant-founded Doshisha University in Kyoto, "Ebina underwent a new religious experience," writes Doi. "...[H]e came to discover his deep desire to seek God the Father as His child... To describe this relationship with God, he used the expression fushi ushin (ethics of the father-son relationship), one of the five basic moral precepts taught by Confucianism. This way of understanding his religious experiences shows that Ebina thought of Christianity as analogous to Confucianism."
Hiromichi Kozaki (1856-1928), also a Kumamoto Western School alumnus, charted a similar spiritual course, though he came to emphasize Confucianism as more forerunner than analogy to Christianity. He discovered, explains Doi, that "though Confucianism speaks of evil and of the necessity of finding a way out of it, it does not teach salvation, as does Christianity. Confucianism is limited to one nation, and speaks of the distinction between upper and lower classes and high and low ranks. In Christianity, the kingdom of God is extended to all nations, and the gospel preaches the equality of all people. Confucianism, however, is not unrelated to Christianity, nor does it contradict it. Like Judaism, Confucianism prepares the way for Christianity... Christianity goes beyond Confucianism; it perfects and fulfills it.
"[Kozaki] gave Christianity a place," Doi sums up ominously, "in the doctrines of an emperor-led nation which sought to enrich and strengthen itself and which engaged in the invasion and conquest of other Asian nations."
***
Was it all for naught? The epic missionary zeal; the heroic martyrdom of unresisting but unyielding peasant men, women and children in the face of an implacable, ruthless regime; the suffering serenely borne ("We're on our way to Paradise," they sang as they died in agony); the revolt to the death at Shimabara that massed government troops needed five full months to crush---and yet today, fewer than 1 percent of Japanese are practicing Christians.
"Few nations on the face of the earth are more resistant and more difficult for Christian mission endeavors," said Lawrence Spalink, Japan Field Director of the Christian Reformed World Missions, in an email interview. "Japan rivals and even exceeds the resistance often seen in the Islamic world. Iraq's Christian population is higher."
That seeds planted at such appalling cost should have withered in a nation otherwise so eagerly, uncritically receptive to anything "Western" demands an explanation even as it defies all attempts to explain.
"There seems to be a veil over the Japanese nation," said Spalink.
"It is estimated," he continued, "that up to 200,000 people gave their lives rather than renounce their loyalty to Christ. There has never been an adequate acknowledgment or meaningful atonement for this terrible government-sponsored atrocity.
"It is rather troubling that there is a similar refusal by many to acknowledge and atone for the evil perpetrated by Japan's neighbors during the early 20th century, and in fact revisionist attempts to whitewash it are on the increase of late.
"Is this veiling of understanding tied to God's judgment for rejection of his Messiah and the persecution of his people? It's an intriguing question that is ultimately impossible to answer definitively. As long as there is no confession, there is no reconciliation. This continues to be the roadblock in peaceable political relations between Japan and her neighbors. Is it also the roadblock in her relations with the Creator, the God of the martyrs of the 17th century?"