by Rachel Lu
Christianity came to Japan in 1549. The Land of the Rising Sun must
have been ready to hear the good news when St Francis Xavier
first set foot on its shores. By the time he left, just two years later,
there were three thousand Japanese Christians. Over the next forty
years that number increased to two hundred thousand. That was
when the persecution began.
The story of Japanese Christianity is grim. It is doubtful whether
any group of Christians has faced such intense persecution over such
a lengthy period. After seeing thousands of Christians tortured and
executed over the course of about fifty years, even the Jesuits
stopped sending missionaries to Japan. The torments inflicted on
these courageous Christian communities have been movingly
depicted by Shusaku Endo in his provocative novel, Silence. Himself
a Japanese Christian, Endo drew on oral histories from Japanese
Catholic communities, which are among relatively few sources of
information about the fate of these Christians through the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One thing, however, is
known. When Commodore Matthew Perry forced his way into Japan
in 1853, he found around twenty thousand Japanese Christians still
practicing their faith in secret. Through centuries of brutal
persecution, and without any support from the West, the gates of
Hell still had not prevailed against Japanese Christianity.
Silence is a work of tremendous power and subtlety, appropriate for
the seasoned Christian. For pure triumphalist hagiography, however,
it is hard to beat St. Alphonsus Liguori’s Victories of the Martyrs,
which provides an account of the much-revered twenty-six martyrs
who were crucified at Nagasaki in 1597. In its own way, this text too
is likely to provoke discomfort. To the average Western reader, the
Japanese thirst for martyrdom seems altogether excessive. We see
women sewing festive garments in preparation for the happy day, as
children beg permission to join their parents in attaining that
glorious crown of death. A son shames his newly converted father
into joining the martyrs instead of fleeing to a more protected
region to practice his faith in secret. Reading these stories as a
twenty-first century American, it is difficult not to think of
kamikaze pilots and samurai warriors falling on their swords, and
to wonder whether these martyrs might not be reflecting a
characteristically Japanese fatalism and a morbid fascination with
death.
--www.crisismagazine.com/2013/lessons-drawn-from-the-japanese-martyrs?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CrisisMagazine+%28Crisis+Magazine%29
