Posted on 06/03/2019 7:46:41 PM PDT by marshmallow
Peter Barakan takes viewers on a tour of the places where the followers of Jesus kept the faith throughout centuries of persecution.
Moviegoers in 2016 learned about a fascinating period in Japanese history from Martin Scorcese’s film adaptation of Silence, the 1966 historical novel by Shūsaku Endō. It is the story of a Jesuit missionary sent to 17th-century Japan, who endures persecution in the time of Kakure Kirishitan (“Hidden Christians”).
A new documentary takes viewers to the various places where Japanese Christians practiced their faith in hiding for about 250 years, and where some today carry on the traditions of their ancestors.
Nagasaki: The Hidden Faces of Faith was produced by Japan’s NHK television network and is narrated in English by veteran Japanese broadcaster Peter Barakan. Much of the documentary shows Barakan taking a boat to islands off the Japanese mainland, where Christians fled to be able to maintain their faith life. The region was designated in 2018 as a World Heritage site by UNESCO and dubbed the “Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region.”
St. Francis Xavier arrived in Japan on August 15, 1549, and had much success initially in spreading the Gospel, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia. Within 50 years there were about 300,000 Christians in Japan.
Things began to change for the worse when a vessel carrying Spanish Franciscans ran aground near Tosa, and the captain strangely remarked that the missionaries had been sent to prepare for the conquest of the country. The Japanese ruler gave orders to draw up a list of Japanese Christians, and on February 5, 1597, 26 were crucified at Nagasaki. St. Paul Miki and Companions are commemorated on the liturgical calendar on February 6.
Persecution subsided for a while, but recommenced in 1614, when shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa decreed that Catholicism be abolished.
(Excerpt) Read more at aleteia.org ...
The authorities didn’t want competition to their power.
Amazing statistic:
Japan today has a lower % of Christians than during the Tokugawa Era. The closest contact most Japanese get with Christianity is when they get married, a ceremony that has mostly been domesticized, but one in which often they’ll hire a priest. Usually he’s not a real Priest.
Also:
We bombed Nagasaki, the city with the highest % of Christians in all Japan.
Ieyasu Tokugawa
I do believe that 37,000 were holed up in a castle somewhere in the country and they were all killed.
“We bombed Nagasaki, the city with the highest % of Christian in all Japan’’. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. There were a lot of Christians there.
[Things began to change for the worse when a vessel carrying Spanish Franciscans ran aground near Tosa, and the captain strangely remarked that the missionaries had been sent to prepare for the conquest of the country. ]
“[T]here was not enough room in Tokugawa Japan for all four religions to co-exist. Christianity was outlawed, not because it was a foreign religion—Confucianism and Buddhism were also foreign in origin—but because of the exclusive nature of the Christian message and the fear that the West would incorporate Japan into their nascent Western empires.”
We’ll lets be clear, Kokura was the primary target for that second drop and Nagasaki was the secondary target. But the city was also strategically significant for its military industrial infrastructure.
When Bock’s Car had a tremendously difficult time visually targeting Kokura city they went to Nagasaki.
Additionally, even if Nagasaki was never a target for the Atomic bomb it likely would have been on the list for cities to be firebombed by the US. There was a lot more cumulative civilian casualties in the firebombing runs over Japan. So its hard to say the city would have been spared in the war.
Agree with everything you said.
Yes, the Japanese, perhaps because of a love for role playing, like the idea of a Christian wedding.
Someone I know who did missionary work in Japan, (a frustrating enterprise) was sometime hired to perform these weddings.
He enjoyed the chance to do Christian prayers in public over the participants.
They crucified them in Kyoto too. Several hundred.
Bkmrk Japan
If there’s been any follow up in the MSM regarding the recent attack on Catholic schoolchildren in Japan, then I’ve missed it. Have the authorities deduced any motive?
Nagasaki was the home base and trading port of the Portuguese Jesuits back in the day.
The Jesuits were making pretty good money off of their cut of the silver-for-silk trade.
What happened was a rowdy bunch of Japanese merchant sailors received harsh punishment in Macao at the hands of the Portuguese governor.
He became the captain of the silk trading vessel, and when it arrived with its new captain, the local Japanese lord was looking to even the score a bit for the Japanese sailors by exercising every bit of minutiae in the trade agreement, including inspecting the contents of the vessel, etc.
The captain wasn’t having any of it, taking umbrage, and deciding to resist and see who would back down.
It escalated into a literal Pyrrhic firefight, with the Japanese attacking with muskets, and while Portuguese successfully fought off the attack, one of the musket balls from the retreating Japanese hit a fire grenade a Portuguese was holding, and the resulting fire fed upon the reefed sails.
Sensing all was lost, and wanting to deny the Japanese a prize, the captain retreated below decks, and is thought to have blown the powder magazine, sinking the ship.
The Jesuits, and their flocks, didn’t fare well after that.
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