Orasho: The Prayers that Were Never Written Down

The word comes from the Latin oratio, prayer, and the Christians of Japan have used it from the first mission to the present day.³The missionaries taught many prayers. A prayer book printed by the Jesuit press in 1600, the Orasho no hon'yaku ("translation of the prayers"), lists thirty five. They include the sign of the cross, the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Salve Regina and the act of contrition. There are prayers for rising and for going to sleep, before and after meals, on leaving the house and on the road, at baptism and on receiving the Eucharist, and the mysteries of the rosary.⁴Sixteen of them were Latin prayers written out in Japanese script, with a Japanese translation beside them; the rest were in Japanese only.⁴

The historian Ikuo Higashibaba points out that the book's Latin title calls it a Doctrina Christiana "with other pious prayers", and that it worked like a catechism in the form of prayers: the essentials of the faith were set out under the name orasho, to be memorised and said on the right occasions.⁴The book named four prayers as special and to be learned by heart, in Latin or in Japanese: the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Creed and the Commandments.⁴Japanese Christians, he notes, also trusted in the power of the prayers themselves; in Bungo they drove out evil spirits by chanting the Our Father and the Hail Mary aloud.⁴

Then the priests were taken away. After the ban of 1614 and the martyrdoms that followed, the Christians who remained had no clergy, and the prayers became the living centre of their faith. Miyazaki Kentarō writes that the orasho were passed on by word of mouth through some two hundred and thirty years of hidden life, because a person found with a written prayer could be put to death.³Even now, he says, many believe that the prayers must be said from memory as they always were, and that their power is weakened if they are read from a book; the very effort of learning them has a meaning of its own.³

The prayers were long. Even said quickly, they could take thirty or forty minutes, and the Japanese prayers among them were full of Latin and Portuguese words.³On Ikitsuki the orasho are said aloud. In Nagasaki, the Gotō Islands and Sotome they were said in silence, perhaps, Miyazaki suggests, because the officials of the Ōmura domain watched so closely.³

A few written texts were also kept, at great risk. The most important was the Konchirisan no ryaku, "a summary of contrition", which Bishop Luís de Cerqueira wrote and had printed in Nagasaki in 1603. The printed copies were all lost, but manuscripts of it were kept secretly among the hidden Christians.⁵⁷Peter Nosco describes it as instruction in contrition and in imploring God's forgiveness, and notes how valuable it must have been to Christians who had no priest to hear their confessions.⁷It taught them that a sinner could still turn back to God with a sorrowful heart. Miyazaki records what it meant to them. Once a year they were made to tread on a copper plate bearing an image of Christ or of Mary, the fumie, to show that they had renounced God; it is said that when they came home they recited the konchirisan, the prayer of contrition, and the orasho over and over, in sorrow for what they had done.³

The same prayers answered the Buddhist funerals the law required. While the priest chanted the sutras over the dead, the Christians would gather in a neighbouring house and recite the "prayer to take away the sutra", and after he had gone they buried their dead again in their own way.³

Two and a half centuries of memory changed the prayers. When people in the Meiji and Taishō periods tried to write down what had been passed on by mouth, Miyazaki notes, the Chinese characters they chose for words like Deusu (Deus), Santamariya (Sancta Maria), anjo (angel), kurosu (cross) and bauchizumo (baptism) kept the sound but often lost the meaning.³He asks whether, for many of the people who recited them, the Latin prayers had come to be felt chiefly as words of mysterious power.³On Ikitsuki, as many as fifty sacred names are called on before the orasho begin, which he reads as Shinto influence.³

Nakazono Shigeo, director of the Shima no Yakata museum on Ikitsuki, who has studied the island's believers for thirty years, sees it the other way round. Some researchers, he says, argue that because the believers did not write their prayers with characters that carried the original sense, the prayers were transformed and no longer reflect Christian doctrine. "But orasho are basically not for transmitting doctrine, but for conveying individuals' feelings to God, so it's more important to use the original words."¹Without missionaries, he says, the believers did not know what to change or how, and so they handed on faithfully what they had received; the elders say so themselves.¹Even today, the words chanted on Ikitsuki are roughly the same as when they first came to Japan.¹

The "Gururiyōza" had been known since research on the hidden Christians began in the early Shōwa period, and it was understood to be a hymn to Our Lady, but no one knew which one.²The musicologist Minagawa Tatsuo of Rikkyō University found it: a setting of O gloriosa Domina, peculiar to Spain, in a book printed at Granada in 1553, with words and melody matching the song of Ikitsuki.²¹In the seventeenth century, Minagawa found, Spain took up an Italian version of the hymn, and the old Spanish melody stopped being sung. It survived there only on paper. The Jesuits had brought it to Japan in the sixteenth century, and the hidden Christians of Ikitsuki, keeping the faith in the form they had received it, went on singing it. So Ikitsuki is now the only place where this melody is still a living song.²

Nakazono adds a postscript: the conductor Nishimoto Tomomi, who has ties to Ikitsuki, performed O gloriosa Domina at the Vatican, and in 2014 gave a concert at Hirado that presented the original hymn beside the island's "Gururiyōza".²The hymn had come home to Rome.

On Ikitsuki the faith is passing. Nakazono reports that in 1954 just under 90 percent of the island's 11,000 people belonged to the old faith; by 2017 there were fewer than 300, and by the time of his interview fewer than 200. The youngest of the four men who still chanted was 67.¹

On the mainland the prayers can still be heard too. On 3 November 2025, at the Karematsu Shrine in Shimokurosaki, Sotome, which honours the missionary remembered as San Jiwan, the leader (chōkata) of the Kurosaki Kakure Kirishitan, Murakami Shigenori, aged 75, offered the orasho for about thirty minutes at the 26th San Jiwan festival.⁶The festival was begun in 2000 by the local Kakure Kirishitan and Catholics together, to give thanks to the ancestors who kept the faith.⁶Murakami said there were about forty believers left in Kurosaki: "We were able to pray properly. The numbers are getting smaller, but I want to keep it going as long as I can."⁶

After the ban was lifted in 1873, many hidden Christians were baptised into the Catholic Church and learned to pray her prayers in the ordinary way; on Ikitsuki, almost none did, and the island kept the prayers of its ancestors.¹But in both, the same thread runs back to the sixteenth century: to a catechist teaching a village to say the Our Father, and to the Mother of God, praised above the stars, in a song from Granada that the hidden Christians never let fall silent.