Keeping the Faith

SHIGERU MURAKAMI, an 80-something labourer with calloused hands and nicotine-stained teeth, jogs forward to a simple wooden structure. This, he explains, is a holy place to Japan's kakure Kirishitan, or hidden Christians, who still worship privately in each other's homes. But in a country where religion is so free that many people practise two of them, why do the kakure Kirishitan prefer to lie low? Therein lies a tale.

When Francis Xavier introduced Christianity to Japan in 1549, the going initially was good-too good. Concerned that the 400,000 or so baptised Japanese might have dual loyalties, the government banned the religion in 1612. Thousands were crucified, boiled, drowned, burnt or otherwise murderously dispatched. Many gave up.

But a large number kept the faith by setting up a secret organisation and using the cover of Buddhist rituals to practise Christian ones. In Sotome, a fishing and coal town not far from Nagasaki, for instance, a shaving from a cross left by the area's last priest would be placed under the white cloth triangle on the forehead that was a required Buddhist death rite. Museums of hidden Christianity display relics of the era, such as plaques with Christian images that Japanese were ordered to trample, and notice-boards announcing the going rate for turning in Christians-500 silver pieces for a priest, 100 for a believer.

Not until 1873 was Christianity legalised again. At that point, most of the 50,000 or so hidden Christians returned to conventional Catholic practice, but a large minority did not wish to. So they continued to gather together secretly in their homes, using rituals developed over the centuries.

The inevitable result of 250 years of underground practice, transmitted orally by people only lightly schooled in the faith in the first place, was a highly unconventional Christianity. A Japanese version of the Bible re-created from memory in the 1820s tells, 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.

The Japanese forms of the Lord's Prayer and the creed had stayed pretty much intact, but Latin terms had been corrupted beyond all meaning. Many of the prayers the kakure Kirishitan recited were nonsensical collections of syllables. Six of the seven Catholic sacraments disappeared due to the lack of clergy to perform them. The result, concludes Kentaro Miyazaki, a scholar of hidden Christianity, is that the kakure Kirishitan evolved into something neither hidden nor Christian, but 'a folk religion altogether Japanese in spirit and content.'

The shrine on which Mr Murakami sits supports that view. Its architecture is classic Shinto, and so is the interior. An altar features a rice bowl and water. A Buddha image is draped with something like pearls, and paper cranes and Japanese flags hang from the walls. There is not a Christian image in sight, says Mr Murakami, because 'in order to protect our religious beliefs, we needed to camouflage them.' But the shrine was built in 1914, long after liberalisation, and post-war Japan has had genuine religious freedom. The real reason is that among hidden Christians, ancestor worship is the most important value; and because the ancestors of Sotome's hidden Christians could not use Christian imagery, their descendants do not.

Other hidden Christian shrines do feature crosses or pictures of Jesus and Mary, but these are probably best understood as a kind of kami - one of the multitudes of Shinto gods to whom the Japanese pray. In practice, hidden Christianity looks and feels an awful lot like Shinto, with a light dusting of Christian symbolism.

The mutual solidarity of persecution bound hidden Christians together; tolerance is proving a more difficult challenge. Mr Miyazaki reckons that there are perhaps 4,000 hidden Christians left in three bits of Nagasaki prefecture. With the living memory of persecution disappearing, young people see little point in clinging to a form of faith that is hardly different from Japan's usual blend of Shinto, Buddhism and apathy. The flight to the cities has also meant that the tight-knit village communities that made secret worship both possible and rather thrilling are dying. The end is perhaps a generation away. But, even as it is eclipsed, hidden Christianity remains a classic illustration of Japan's uncanny ability to take the offerings of another culture-as it did with Buddhism from Korea, writing from China and quality control from America-and then make them uniquely its own.

© 1997 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved

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Updated August 8, 1997