The Religious Organizations Law of 1939 and the Catholic Church

For forty years the Japanese state tried to bring the religions under one law. A Religious Bill was put to the House of Peers in 1899 and rejected; further drafts in 1927, 1929 and 1935 also failed.¹²The Religious Organizations Law (Law no. 77) finally passed and was promulgated on April 8, 1939, and came into force on April 1, 1940.¹The law "strongly reflected the character of a control law in line with the nationalist policy of the time."¹

For the Catholic Church it brought two great changes. The first was in its leadership. Most Japanese dioceses were still led by foreign missionaries, and the government required that they be Japanese (Disputed). With the guidance of the apostolic delegate, Archbishop Paolo Marella, and out of concern that a Church dependent on foreign missionaries might be crushed, the foreign bishops and prefects resigned in 1940 and 1941, and Japanese priests were named in their place; by 1941 every diocese and mission in Japan was headed by a Japanese.³⁴⁵Rome named some eighteen Japanese priests as bishops or ordinaries for Japan and its colonies (Unverified).⁵A wartime priest, Fr Shimura Tatsuya, called this "an event to be written large in the history of the Church in Japan."⁴Several of the missionaries who had stepped down stayed on to serve quietly: Archbishop Chambon, formerly of Tokyo, became chaplain to the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary novitiate at Totsuka.³

The second change was legal. The Church as it had existed was in effect dissolved, and in May 1941 it was recognized anew as a single religious body, the Nihon Tenshu Kōkyō Kyōdan ("Japan Catholic Religious Body"), under Archbishop Doi Tatsuo of Tokyo.³⁴The government required at least 5,000 members for recognition; the Church had 119,224 faithful, 308 foreign and 159 Japanese priests, 290 men religious and 1,685 women religious.⁶It was now under state supervision.³Under the new law Christianity, until then legally only one of the "religions other than Shinto", was for the first time recognized as a religion in its own right.⁶On July 1, 1941 Archbishop Doi sent the religious superiors the body's general rules. They told its history from St. Francis Xavier's arrival, through the vicariate of 1846 and Bishop Hayasaka in 1927, and stated its faith without dilution: the Pope, successor of St. Peter and vicar of Christ, as head of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.⁶

After the war, the occupation authorities demanded the law's abolition in their memorandum of October 4, 1945 (SCAPIN-93), and it was repealed later that year.¹In November 1945 the bishops dissolved the Kyōdan and formed a federation of dioceses.⁴