Kirishitan

Kirishitan, in Japanese history, a Japanese Christian or Japanese Christianity, specifically relating to Roman Catholic missionaries and converts in 16th- and 17th-century Japan. The term derives from the Portuguese word cristão, meaning “Christian.” Modern Japanese Christianity is known as Kirisuto-kyō.

Arrival of Christianity in Japan and the 26 martyrs of 1597

Christian missionaries led by the Spanish Jesuit St. Francis Xavier entered Japan in 1549, only six years after the first Portuguese traders. Over the next century they converted hundreds of thousands of Japanese—perhaps half a million—to Christianity. The influence of the Jesuits, and later, Franciscans, was enormous, and the growth of the new sect raised political fears that helped fuel Japan’s decision to exclude all foreign traders but the Dutch, the Chinese, and the Koreans.

The warlord Oda Nobunaga had taken his first step toward uniting Japan as the first missionaries landed, and as his power increased he encouraged the growing Kirishitan movement as a means of subverting the great political strength of Buddhism. Oppressed peasants welcomed the gospel of salvation, but merchants and trade-conscious daimyos saw Christianity as an important link with valuable European trade. Oda’s successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, was much cooler toward the alien religion. The Japanese were becoming aware of competition between the Jesuits and the Franciscans and between Spanish and Portuguese trading interests. Toyotomi questioned the reliability of subjects with some allegiance to the foreign power at the Vatican. In 1587 he ordered all foreign missionaries to leave Japan but did not enforce the edict harshly until a decade later, when 26 Christians, including 20 native Kirishitan and six missionaries, were martyred.

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The hidden Christians (Kakure Kirishitan)

After Toyotomi’s death in 1598 and the brief regency of his adopted child, the pressures relaxed. However, Tokugawa Ieyasu, who founded the great Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1867), gradually came to see the foreign missionaries as a threat to political stability. By 1614, through his son and successor, Tokugawa Hidetada, he banned Kirishitan and ordered the missionaries expelled. Severe persecution continued for a generation under his son and grandson. Kirishitan were required to renounce their faith on pain of exile or torture; the renunciation often took the form of forcing the Kirishitan to step on a fumi-e, an image of Christ or the Virgin Mary. Every family was required to belong to a Buddhist temple, and periodic reports on them were expected from the temple priests.

The Shimabara Rebellion, an uprising in 1637–38 of a community of Kirishitan in the Shimabara Peninsula, was put down only with difficulty, and its eventual failure intensified efforts to root out the faith. By 1650 all known Kirishitan had been exiled or executed. Undetected survivors were driven underground into a secret movement that came to be known as Kakure Kirishitan (“Hidden Christians”), existing mainly in western Kyushu island around Nagasaki and Shimabara. To avoid detection they were obliged to practice deceptions such as using images of the Virgin Mary disguised as the popular and merciful Bōsatsu (bodhisattva) Kannon, whose gender is ambiguous and whom carvers often render as female.

The populace at large remained unaware that the Kakure Kirishitan managed to survive for two centuries, and when the prohibition against Roman Catholics began to ease again in the mid-19th century, arriving European priests were told there were no Japanese Christians left. The Oura Cathedral, a Roman Catholic church set up in Nagasaki in 1865, was dedicated to the 26 martyrs of 1597, and within the year 20,000 Kakure Kirishitan dropped their disguise and openly professed their Christian faith. They faced some repression during the waning years of the Tokugawa shogunate, but early in the reforms of the emperor Meiji (reigned 1867–1912) the Kirishitan won the right to declare their faith and worship publicly.

About 14,000 of the long-hidden Christians established relations with the European priests and found their way into the Roman Catholic Church. A large remainder, however, practiced a form of Christianity that came to feature elements of Buddhism and other non-Christian traditions during the communities’ two centuries of isolation. These, hidden no longer, came to be known as Hanare Kirishitan, or Separate Christians.

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Legacy

The period of the early Christian missionaries in Japan and the Kakure Kirishitan are depicted in Japanese author Endō Shūsaku’s celebrated 1966 novel Chinmoku (Silence). In 2018 many of the Kakure Kirishitan communities were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site under the name “Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region.” Several memorials to the 26 martyrs of 1597 have been constructed in Nagasaki, including a museum as well as Japanese sculptor Yasutake Funakoshi’s monument that was installed at the martyrs’ execution site in 1962 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of their canonization.