First impressions in the sixteenth century
The first Japanese to meet the missionaries were struck by their poverty, which Japanese society held in contempt.When envoys from Bungo (豊後) debated Francis Xavier's poverty, a young lord wondered that a great God would be served by so poor a man, while an old noble replied that such poverty might be dearer to that God than all riches.At Yamaguchi (山口), hearers objected that the Christian God was cruel because he allowed no release from hell, while Buddhist priests claimed they could free souls.Others were won over by talks on astronomy and weather, and said they could remain forever in the company of "the learned European bonze".
Hostile rumours spread as well.Buddhist priests in the capital accused the Jesuits of eating human flesh, sucking blood and murdering infants, and children hooted at Father Villela as a man-eater.The courage of the martyrs, however, made a deep impression on those who watched.Pagans who saw the crucifixions of 1597 asked what new law made death a jest even for children.At Kuchinotsu (口之津) in 1614, lords and officers said the Fathers must be marvellous teachers, since their Christians gave their lives for a salvation no eye could see.In 1633 guards at Osaka (大阪) told arrested priests that they would become Christians themselves if the emperor did not forbid it.
The long memory of the ban
Japan's rulers came to see Christianity above all as a political danger.Japanese books relate that in 1611 a priest from Yatsushiro (八代) told Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川家康) that the King of Spain paid for missions and seized countries once enough people there were Christian.The scholar Hayashi Razan (林羅山) wrote that "Christianity is a false doctrine", likening it to foxes and badgers that devour young women and take their forms, and said it made children thieves and subjects rebels.After the great persecutions of the seventeenth century the faith was commonly called ja-kyō, the perverse religion.
The fear lasted more than two centuries.In 1853 almost all the daimyo who answered Commodore Perry's letter assumed that the Portuguese of old had pursued designs on Japan through trade and the spread of their religion.At the signing of the Treaty of Kanagawa (神奈川) on March 31, 1854, the Japanese refused to write the characters for "our Lord Jesus Christ" in the date, and the commodore allowed the omission.When Townsend Harris pressed for tolerance, his Japanese friends replied that on Christianity their hearts were not of stone but of iron, and asked him to let time take its course.In 1859 interpreter pupils at Nagasaki (長崎) had to hand back New Testaments a missionary had given them, because the book was prohibited by name.The men who assassinated Ii Naosuke (井伊直弼) in March 1860 condemned the shogunate for letting foreigners build places of worship for the evil religion.
A few leaders saw a difference between old and new.In 1863 Matsudaira Shungaku (松平春嶽) told the court that the doctrine now discussed was quite different from the Kirishitan of former times and could safely be tolerated.Yet in February 1869 Yokoi Shonan (横井小楠), a counsellor who had urged religious freedom, was assassinated on suspicion of harbouring evil opinions, meaning Christianity.
Rumour and fear in the countryside
Long after the ban ended, frightening rumours about Christians went round the villages.Many people believed that the chief rite of a Christian funeral was driving an iron spike into the skull of the dead, until the first Christian funeral at Okayama (岡山) proved otherwise.A Buddhist priest told the father of a mission-school pupil that foreigners ran fine, cheap schools in order to extract a precious drug from the bodies of Japanese girls.In 1883 people in Bungo blamed Father Fraineau for fifteen days of rain, and said that leaves turned into banknotes in his hands.Catechumens at Ichimanda refused even to be called "Christians", so hated was the old name.
Fear could turn into violence.In the summer of 1879, during a cholera epidemic, peasants near Niigata (新潟) attacked a medical missionary and demolished his preaching place, believing Christians had caused the disease.In the mid-1880s chapels were stoned, and some congregations kept the stones as "Persecution Stones" or built them into a church's foundation.In 1894 villagers in Ise (伊勢) drew up a covenant against two Orthodox converts, barring them from the common forests and from entering others' houses.
Westernisers and nationalists
Meiji leaders weighed Christianity against the national interest.Some scholars and Shinto officials held that "Shinto is not a religion" but a system of government rules for keeping patriotism alive.The writer Fukuzawa Yukichi (福沢諭吉) argued in 1881 and 1882 that Christianity would make Japanese side with foreign nations, and that Buddhism should be the one religion of Japan.In 1884 he reversed himself, urging Japan to adopt Christianity to remove the stigma of being an anti-Christian country and so win equal treaties, while professing no personal interest in religion.A Japanese essay of 1886 recalled students around 1879 who hated Christianity because it stood in their minds for whatever opposed the honour and independence of the nation, and said a marvellous change had since come.
The mood turned again from the autumn of 1887, under the slogan Kokusui Hozon, or Preservation of the National Excellencies.A Buddhist association pledged its members to keep Christians out of parliament, honours and teaching posts as disloyal to the Emperor.Soldiers were told not to attend Christian meetings or keep Christian books.From 1889 to 1893 Buddhists ran an anti-Christian campaign that included violence and the destruction of church buildings in the provinces.In Nagoya (名古屋) in May 1893, hired toughs broke up a public meeting of the Japanese Evangelical Alliance.
Loyalty and the Emperor
A recurring charge against Christianity was divided loyalty.Critics held that the faith seemed to disregard loyalty and filial piety, the cardinal virtues, and so threatened the moral order.Catholics drew particular suspicion: a Protestant historian of the time judged that Catholicism was charged with weakening loyalty more often than Protestantism, because of memories of the seventeenth century, the few Catholics in public life and the Church's record in Europe.In 1897 nationalist scholars asked whether authorities outside the State, such as the Pope and the head of the Greek Church, could be regarded as harmless.The Paris Foreign Missions reported in 1906 that national pride kept Japanese from accepting any foreign authority over them besides the Emperor.
Official voices remained divided.In 1904 Prime Minister Katsura Taro (桂太郎) told a missionary that a man in Japan could be a Buddhist, a Christian or a Jew without suffering for it, and that abandoning religious freedom would violate the Constitution.In July 1907 Baron Kato Hiroyuki (加藤弘之) told the Imperial Academy that Christianity put its God above the Emperor and declared: "The Rescript and Christianity are absolutely irreconcilable."Christian replies called his arguments twenty years out of date.
Respect at a distance today
Recent surveys suggest benign indifference rather than hostility.Two out of three Japanese reportedly say they have no personal religious faith.Many treat Buddhism and Shinto as custom but see Christianity as a religion in the full sense, and a Western one.Seventy per cent are reported to visit a Shinto shrine at New Year, yet most celebrate Christmas.Public schools give no religious education, and in a 1980 survey most people said they first learned of Christianity in school history or social studies classes.
A small survey published in 2004, of 132 non-Christians, mostly young women from the Shizuoka (静岡) area, found a more positive than negative image of Christianity.Of those asked, 92.4 per cent thought Christianity was good for Christians if it helped them, but 68.9 per cent would probably not consider converting.Most respondents, 82.6 per cent, had no Christian relative, and they reported seeing Christian lives on television and in films more often than meeting Christians.Writers on mission add that becoming a Christian can be seen as breaking wa, the harmony of the community, because it means giving up festivals and offerings to ancestors.Respect can still sit alongside distance: in Tokyo (東京), a non-Christian mother asked a teacher to make her daughter a Christian so that she would learn good behaviour.
What is uncertain
Where the sources disagree
- Whether the old hostility was political or religious. Ishizaka argued that political expediency, not religious fanaticism, made the Japanese regard Christianity as a national enemy, and Ryder called the extirpation of Catholicism political;Cary, by contrast, rejected the claim that Buddhists never persecuted until Christians taught them, pointing to earlier attacks on the Nichiren sect.
- Koyama argues that many sixteenth-century Japanese found the missionaries' God crueller than the Buddhism they knew, because he left their ancestors in hell; this is an interpretation rather than new evidence.
- The 2004 survey is small, young and regionally skewed. 137 respondents, 70.8 per cent women, average age 27.8, most living in the Chubu region.Its comparison figure for Christians in Korea is flagged as an error in the source and is not used here.
- The 1886 essay on student attitudes, and the account of Katsura's 1904 interview, both reach us secondhand through English-language papers.