In Kyushu with the Hidden Christians
By Kathleen Olive, Limelight Arts Travel director
In April this year, I was fortunate enough to undertake a research trip for Limelight Arts Travel’s tour, Osaka to Nagasaki: Temples and Tombs, to be led by archaeologist Ben Churcher in May 2024. The tour is a historical survey of Japan’s most ancient histories, showcasing the stunning variety beyond the well-known “Golden Triangle” of Tokyo, Kanazawa and Kyoto.
I was heading much further south than any of these well-known destinations, to Kyushu. Known for its natural beauty, onsen or spa towns, and a well-preserved culture of artisanal tradition (particularly pottery villages like Arita and Imari), it also has a regional cuisine that is held in high regard throughout the nation. For gastronomes like the Japanese, that’s saying a lot!
KYUSHU AND THE WIDER WORLD
Kyushu’s geographical position has also meant that it’s long been Japan’s gateway to mainland Asia. Humans probably first arrived in the archipelago here, thanks to a land bridge from present-day Korea. Kyushu’s proximity to Asia even tempted the forces of Kublai Khan’s Mongols – not once, but twice! But I was off to look at a different aspect of Japan’s contact with the world: the phenomenon of the so-called “Hidden Christians”.
For centuries, the ports of Kyushu also hosted traders from China, and later the Kingdom of Portugal and the Dutch Republic, who sought to ply their wares in ports such as Nagasaki and to export Japan’s in-demand luxury commodities. This trade really took off in the sixteenth century, giving rise to the introduction of new technologies such as matchlock weaponry; this ultimately played a pivotal role in the so-called “Warring States” period, a multi-generational battle for power that ended with the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate in Edo/Tokyo.
Map of southern Japan, showing Kyushu with its principal cities of Kitakyushu, Fukuoka and Kumamoto. Nagasaki is at the extreme west of the island. The Amakusa islands lie south of Nagasaki, where Shimoshima is marked on this map.
Foreign traders in Kyushu didn’t just bring goods: they brought ideas, too. Kyushu had been the historic location of Buddhism’s introduction, thanks to emissaries and diplomats from Korea. Contact with China had sponsored the adoption of Confucian principles of government. In the sixteenth century, Dutch and Portuguese traders – and missionaries such as Francis Xavier who travelled close on their heels – brought Christianity.
The new religion flourished in Japan for less than two generations before it was driven underground. It’s not surprising that the Japanese were open to a new religion: Shinto, Buddhism and Confucianism had co-existed for millennia, and a syncretistic blending of these three belief systems had long been the norm. Even in today’s census data, Japanese typically identify as Buddhist and Shinto in equal measure. So in the early modern period, professing an additional religion was clearly not out of the question.
What is surprising is that Christianity, of all possible religious traditions, should have appealed so strongly to the Japanese in the archipelago’s south. Monotheistic – unlike Shinto or Buddhism – and wary of adherents following multiple spiritual paths, Christianity was radically different. Even so, there were some touch points: the Buddhist figure of Kannon, a kind of genderless equivalent of the Madonna of Mercy, had been a popular intercessor for centuries, and the Virgin Mary could seamlessly occupy the same role.
A statuette of the Virgin and Child, in the guise of Kannon, the Buddhist deity of mercy. This piece was confiscated from the house of a Hidden Christian and is now on display in the Kyushu National Museum (photo: Kathleen Olive).
Initially, Christians and their converts were in good odour with Japan’s first great sixteenth-century ‘unifier,’ Oda Nobunaga. He particularly favoured the Jesuits. But by 1587 his successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, had banned proselytising by bateren (as Portuguese priests were known, from padre), concerned by rumours of the Jesuits forcing conversions or trafficking in enslaved converts. Persecution of Christian missionaries began to rise, and in 1597 one of its most notorious manifestations saw the crucifixion of 26 Christians outside Nagasaki. When I arrived in that fascinating city, I discovered that these stories were very well told in its Museum of History and Culture.
“closed country” politics & the shimabara rebellion
Toyotomi’s successor, Tokugawa Ieyasu, showed himself even less willing to tolerate potential rivals to his sovereignty. Sovereignty was a key concern for the Tokugawa Shogunate, and its ultimate goal was autarchy or self-sufficiency. This was most clearly realised in its sakoku or “closed/locked country” policy.
From 1633 to 1853, Japan’s borders to the world were shut: diplomatic relations and trade were restricted. Foreign nationals were forbidden from entering the country and export of Japanese goods was severely limited. Of course some trade was still necessary, so Chinese and Dutch merchants were permitted to land in a few ports. Nagasaki was the foremost of these, and its vibrant Chinatown and artificial island of Dejima – essentially a Dutch caravanserai down on the port – still evoke this history very clearly.
It was under the Tokugawa Shogunate that Christianity would be outlawed. The southernmost ports of Kyushu had been the first to be Christianised, which is why I was headed to inspect their historic Christian sites. In a tiny box of a rental car, I drove south from the castle town of Kumamoto to the Amakusa Islands – slowly, as the speed limit was 50kmph for much of this coastal drive.
It was very scenic, the coast road offering a constant view across the water to Mount Unzen. This smouldering volcano outside Nagasaki historically represented an entrance to the Underworld, and after Christianity’s suppression, Christians from Nagasaki who refused to abjure were sometimes thrown alive into its boiling depths. I had a very benign encounter with Unzen, looking towards it from the charming miniature port of Misumi West, constructed in the Meiji Period when Japan’s borders were once again open and Western architecture was all the rage.
Looking westwards from Misumi West, a Meiji-era ‘toy port’. The landscape of Kyushu is characterised by mountain-islands stretching down to blue, blue seas (photo: Kathleen Olive).
As I crossed the Tenmon Bridge onto the Amakusa Islands, I was closer to the heartland of the Hidden Christians. One of the possible events that precipitated Tokugawa suppression of Christianity was a 1630s peasant revolt here and in the shadow of Unzen on the nearby Shimabara Peninsula. Famished peasants, tired of over-taxation by their daimyo or feudal lords, were joined in their rebellion by a powerful and restless class, the rōnin or masterless samurai.
Local forces were not strong enough to restrain them, but thanks to an allied army the rebels were finally besieged at Hara Castle. Despite ruthless suppression, they raised their standard and vainly tried to hold out. Many of the rebels happened to be Christian – converted, in fact, by a previous daimyo – so their standard invoked the Most Holy Sacrament. Furthermore, their beliefs represented too strong a threat to Tokugawa sovereignty. The Shimabara Rebellion, in many ways, represents the end of Christianity in Japan for more than 200 years. Or so it seemed.
fumi-e (“stepping-on” pictures) & the suppression of christianity
At the Amakusa Christian Museum, set on a hill and overlooking an extraordinary archipelago of small islands, I learned the fascinating events of the Shimabara Rebellion and viewed a replica of the famous but fragile standard. The museum also preserves a collection of fascinating artefacts, visible in collections across Japan. These are fumi-e or “stepping-on pictures”.
After 1629, Christians in Nagasaki and other parts of the country were made to step on these small tablets to demonstrate that they had renounced their faith. The tablets usually showed images of Christ or the Virgin Mary, forcing Christian sympathisers to blaspheme and, by their reluctance to do so, uncover their true beliefs. Tests were periodic and remained a common practice even after 1856, when the sakoku policy was lifted and foreigners were freely allowed into Japan again.
A modern illustration showing the fumi-e 'test of faith’, with villagers of southern Japan forced to step on Christian images in denial of their faith (photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0).
And yet, despite this, Christianity in southern Kyushu survived. Driven underground by persecution, Christians in the Amakusa Islands and Nagasaki region held on to the beliefs and rituals they had been taught by missionaries in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. On Ikitsuki Island, outside Nagasaki, elderly Christians still sing sacred songs derived from Spanish priests’ sixteenth-century Latin. Village home churches, or kumi, took over the practices once exercised by foreign bateren, with mizukata administering secret baptisms and chokata ensuring that the liturgical calendar was maintained.
Heading further south from Amakusa City, I came to Sakitsu. I found this small, remote fishing village one of the most fascinating of the many Hidden Christian sites I visited. Its rigorous fishermen’s hierarchy allowed for Christian systems to be surreptitiously maintained: Ebisu, the indigenous Japanese deity who protects fishermen, was fervently worshipped as Deus, or Lord of All. Abalone shells were openly venerated, as the native Shinto tradition permitted, due to their symbolic association with the Virgin Mary as taught by the missionaries.
View onto Sakitsu fishing village, from the headman’s house in this southernmost port of the Amakusa Islands. The spire of Sakitsu church can just be seen against the wooded mountains beyond (photo: Kathleen Olive).
1865: the hidden christians re-emerge
As I learned in Sakitsu’s small museum, the Hidden Christians of the village continued their secret practices for about 250 years. In 1853, American pressure resulted in Japan’s opening up to the world again, and foreign communities began to take up residence in the country after hundreds of years. Christianity remained illegal, but it was clear that trade and foreign relations required a blind eye be turned to foreigners’ Christian practices.
In Nagasaki, this included the French Catholics who, in 1864, decided to construct a cathedral in the city. This is the so-called “French temple” of Oura, damaged in the August 1945 bombing of Nagasaki and today one of the city’s most peaceful historic sites. One month after the church had been dedicated, its priest Father Petitjean was at prayer inside. Fifteen Christians – many of them women, the faith’s most dedicated keepers – approached him. One, Yuri Sugimoto, whispered, “We have the same feelings in our heart as you.”
Father Petitjean was amazed to realise that these Japanese were Christians. He led them to a statue of the Virgin Mary, whom they recognised. (The statue still stands in the grounds of the cathedral today.) The Christians of Nagasaki were hidden no more. While it would be some years before Christianity was legalised in 1871, the tide had turned.
In 1888, a church could finally be built in the remote fishing village of Sakitsu. An imposing Gothic building, it towers over the tiny harbour, and its altar is located over the site of a former fumi-e used to test the villagers’ faith. Memorably, one removes one’s shoes at the entrance to this Christian temple, because inside the floors are covered in tatami mats. Nothing has ever conveyed Japan’s seamless melding of foreign influences with local aesthetics so strongly to me as stepping inside this Gothic church, with its simple stained-glass windows, only to smell the sweet, grassy scent of tatami under my feet!
Nagasaki’s Oura cathedral, set on a hill and surveying the port city.
The nineteenth-century reintroduction of Christian missionaries into Japan had unexpected consequences. Priests were horrified to discover some of the practices maintained by the Hidden Christians: they thought them far too syncretistic, heterodox, and even perilously close to idolatry. Many Hidden Christians were discouraged and abandoned their faith entirely, converting to Buddhism and Shinto.
CHRISTIANITY IN JAPAN TODAY
Others were encouraged to ‘update’ their faith and submit to the authority of distant Christian leaders. There are now churches all over Japan, but only 1.9 million people identified with the faith in a 2022 census – a tiny 1-1.5% of the total population. Their churches and meeting places are what we would usually expect to find from Christianity anywhere in the world, as I discovered just twenty minutes’ drive from Sakitsu at Oe Tenshudo. This white Romanesque-style church is thoroughly Western, proudly surveying terraced hills and decorated with stained glass to celebrate the Christianising efforts in 1933 of French pateru-san or “Mister Father” Garnier.
In other parts of Kyushu, however, particularly around Nagasaki, many Hidden Christians decided instead to uphold the rituals and beliefs that they had practised in secret for centuries. These are still known as the kakure kirishitan or Hidden Christians, and their tenacity and unique cultural contributions were recognised with UNESCO World Heritage status in 2018.
The sites, all concentrated in the region I visited – the Amakusa Islands, Shimabara Peninsula and region around Nagasaki – are frequently set in remote locations of natural beauty. While it takes some effort to visit them, they are a reminder of how unique Japan’s history is … and of how much we can still discover of it.
Learn more:
An informative website on the Hidden Christians, prepared by Japan as part of the UNESCO World Heritage bid
A closer look at the Hidden Christian sites in and around Nagasaki
Information on travelling to the Hidden Christian sites, from the always excellent Japan Guide
A short video, with good visuals, from the BBC
Silence (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2016), an evocative film based on Shūsaku Endō’s powerful 1966 novel of the same name
Dr Kathleen Olive visited southern Japan’s Hidden Christian sites on an inspection trip for Limelight Arts Travel’s tour, Osaka to Nagasaki: Temples and Tombs, to be led by Ben Churcher in May 2024. It takes in the majority of sites described here, on an excursion to the Amakusa Islands and over 3 nights in Nagasaki.