The Tenshō embassy before Pope Gregory XIII, 1585. Unknown Roman painter. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. About this image →
The Great Genna Martyrdom, Nagasaki, 1622. Unidentified painter, 17th century. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. About this image →
A Portuguese ship arrives: Nanban screen by Kano Domi. Kano Domi, about 1600. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. About this image →
日本のキリスト教史
The history of Christianity in Japan, told mainly through its Catholic side, from 1549 to today. Every fact cited.
Where would you like to start?
A church grows fast. Francis Xavier lands at Kagoshima. Within two generations Japanese converts, catechists and lords build one of the largest Christian communities in Asia.
Missionaries, daimyo and the first Japanese Jesuits.
Outlawed, then hidden. A nationwide ban sends priests away and martyrs to their deaths. Villages keep the faith in secret, stepping on fumi-e each New Year and praying for forgiveness.
Some 220 years of faith with no priests.
Discovery, and exile. Urakami farmers reveal themselves at Ōura. The response is the fourth Urakami crackdown: a whole village sent into exile across Japan.
A question at Ōura, and a village sent away.
The anti-Christian notice boards come down. The exiles return and build a cathedral, but the church lives under the state’s shadow until the war.
Tolerated, rebuilt, and quietly held in check by the state.
Enter chapter →The bomb, and after. The atomic bomb falls on Urakami and its cathedral. From the ruins comes real religious freedom, and a small church that is still here.
Ruin at Urakami, then religious freedom and a rebuilt cathedral.
On the afternoon of March 17, 1865, a French priest named Bernard Petitjean was in his new church on the hill at Ōura…Read the introduction
A Japanese Jesuit who walked much of the way to Rome, came home to a country that had banned his faith, and died in Edo in 1639.
“Where is the statue of Santa Maria?”
Asked of Father Petitjean at Ōura by villagers from Urakami, after some 220 years without a priest. Read the story of the discovery
Churches, martyrdom sites, hidden Christian villages and memorials.
Open the map →Feasts, martyrdoms and turning points that fell on today's date, each with its source.
See the whole year →Every fact links to its source: scholarship, diocesan records and original documents. Where the sources run out, we say so.
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