Themes

For more than two centuries the people of Nagasaki began each new year by stepping on an image of Christ or Mary, a test meant to expose Christians that became a routine of government, and that the hidden Christians…

For two and a half centuries, with no priests and under threat of death, villagers in western Kyushu kept a Christian faith alive through lay leaders, memorised prayers and a feast calendar; after 1873 some rejoined the…

For two and a half centuries, wooden notice boards at the roadsides of Japan promised silver to anyone who betrayed a priest or a Christian; the price rose decade by decade, and the boards came down only on 24 February…

Unable to keep an image of the Virgin, the hidden Christians of Urakami, Sotome and other places honoured her through white porcelain figures of the bodhisattva Kannon made in southern China; they called her…

From Francis Xavier's landing on the feast of the Assumption in 1549, through the hidden Christians' Hail Marys and their porcelain "Hantamaruya," to the question "Where is Santa Maria?" at Ōura in 1865 and the scorched…

The orasho (from Latin oratio, prayer) are the Latin, Portuguese and Japanese prayers the missionaries taught; the hidden Christians kept them by heart for more than two centuries, and on Ikitsuki one of them, the…

From the 1630s every household in Japan had to belong to a Buddhist temple that would certify in writing that it was not Christian; the hidden Christians lived inside this system for more than two centuries, kept their…

From the 1550s Japan's Christians organised themselves in lay brotherhoods, first on the model of the Portuguese Misericórdia, caring for the poor, the sick and the dead, and then as kumi, devotional confraternities…

The Protestant Dutch, who reached Japan in 1600 and traded from Hirado and then Dejima until 1855, were rivals of the Catholic powers and at times served the shogunate against the Church, at the Hirayama affair of 1620…

For ninety-five years, from Francis Xavier's landing at Kagoshima to the death of the last priest left in the country, the Society of Jesus carried most of the work of the first Japanese mission, and its deepest hope…

Founded by Bishop Hayasaka before the statue of Santa Maria at Ōura on 9 June 1934, with Sister Magdalena Esumi Yasu as its first superior, the Junshin Sisters built a Catholic school for girls in Urakami, lost 214 of…

With no priest in Japan for more than two centuries, the hidden Christians kept their faith through lay officers: a keeper of the calendar, a baptiser, and a messenger who knew every house.

For almost three centuries the shogun's magistrate at Nagasaki ran the port, the trade and the hunt for Christians: his office rose on the sites of the demolished churches, his men introduced the fumie and raided…

From 1593 the mendicant orders, the barefoot friars who came by way of Manila, joined the Jesuits in Japan: the Franciscans gave the Church its first martyr saints in 1597, the Dominicans and Augustinians followed in…

For almost a century the Portuguese great ship sailed each summer from Macao to Japan, carrying Chinese silk one way and Japanese silver the other, and with them the priests, letters, alms and books of the Japan…