History

Christianity arrived in Japan with the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier in 1549, and spread rapidly through the western domains of Kyushu, where local lords found it a useful counterweight to Buddhist temple authority. By 1600, there were an estimated 300,000 Japanese Christians. The first great persecution came in 1597, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered the crucifixion of 26 Christians — Japanese converts and foreign missionaries — on a hill above Nagasaki. This event, known as the Martyrdom of the 26 Saints of Japan, is commemorated at the Martyrs’ Monument in Nishizaka, Nagasaki, one of the 12 UNESCO sites.

The Tokugawa shogunate intensified suppression from 1614, requiring all Japanese subjects to register with a Buddhist temple (the terauke system), publicly trample on religious images (fumie), and denounce Christians. Missionaries were expelled or executed; Japanese Christians who refused to apostatise faced death by crucifixion, burning, or the notorious practice of suspended torture in a pit. By the mid-17th century, open Christianity had been effectively eliminated — or so the authorities believed.

In the coastal villages and remote islands of the Nagasaki region, however, communities of Kakure Kirishitan had gone underground. They preserved their faith across generations through oral transmission, prayers that had gradually transformed into Japanese rhythms barely recognisable as Latin, and devotional practices hidden within Buddhist and Shinto ritual forms. The figure of Maria Kannon — the Virgin Mary disguised as the Buddhist bodhisattva Kannon — became an iconic expression of this syncretistic survival.

When France obtained a clause guaranteeing freedom of worship for foreigners in the 1858 treaties, a French mission was allowed to build Oura Cathedral in Nagasaki. In 1865, a group of villagers from Urakami approached Fr. Bernard Petitjean and disclosed that they had been secretly Christian for generations — the Discovery of Hidden Christians that astonished the world. Subsequent persecution by the Meiji government (1867–1873) saw thousands exiled; final emancipation came with the Meiji constitution of 1873.