Japan's Crypto-Christians

Persecuted by the shogun, they still worship a "closetgod"

On the picturesque Japanese island of Ikitsuki, where the ways of farmers and fishermen die hard, two old men squat before a home altar and chant prayers carefully entrusted to them by their ancestors. The ritual is intense and moving. But something is askew. The rite is partly Buddhist, partly Christian. The language sounds odd, a sort of pidgin Latin. And what do the ancient prayers mean? One of the worshipers admits, "I don't understand a word of this."

Neither does anyone else. The men at prayer are among 10,000 surviving Kakure Kirishitan (crypto-Christians)--members of a fossilized faith that is unique in church annals. The poignant tale of the sect begins in 1549, when Jesuit Missionary Francis Xavier brought Roman Catholicism to Japan. The new creed soon gathered 300,000 followers, including most of the inhabitants of Ikitsuki, but its success also spelled its doom. Fearing the Christians' growth and foreign links, the warlord ruler Hideyoshi and later shogun mounted terror campaigns in which tens of thousands perished, often gruesomely. Christianity was all but stamped out.

But the Christians on Ikitsuki and neighboring islands, who were among the first to suffer, early on developed a way to preserve elements of their faith. Adopting a complex sham, they worshiped publicly at Buddhist temples, then slipped away at night to hold secret Christian prayer meetings. At home, they prayed overtly before Buddhist and Shinto altars, but their real altar became the nan do garni (closet god), innocuous-looking bundles of cloth in which revered Christian statues and medallions were hidden. For 2 1/2 centuries, their fierce faith endured, but it inevitably also turned inward. Because their prayers and rituals had to be transmitted secretly among illiterate peasants, they slowly became garbled. Over the years the words were repeated while the meaning was forgotten, though some prayers retained a discernible Latin antecedent: "Ame Maria karassa binno domisu terikobintsu . . ." obviously derives from "Ave Maria gratia plena dominus tecum benedicta . . ."

In 1865, when Japan permitted a Catholic church to open in Nagasaki to serve Western visitors, the Kakure, then numbering around 30,000 in the region, suddenly came out of hiding. But the missionaries took a hard line with the newfound faithful. "Many were bewildered when they were told to throw away everything connected with their ancestral way," explains Father Shigeshi Oyama, who runs the tiny Roman Catholic parish now on Ikitsuki. Only half of the underground Christians decided to reunite with Rome. The others persisted in their insular worship.

Today on Ikitsuki, the center of the Kakure population, there are 80 house churches with their closet god. At such public ceremonies as Kakure funerals, a Buddhist priest is always asked to officiate, but, says one of them, "these people make sure to give a prayer in secret to erase the effect of ours." The sect's leader, the Ojisama (Revered Uncle), conducts a baptism-like ceremony with water drawn from a site of 17th century martyrdom.

Are the Kakure Christians? Jesuit Diego Yuuki calls their faith "a melange of Buddhism, Shintoism, animism and what Kakure think is Catholicism. They have no Bible. The meaning of the Trinity has been lost on them." Nonetheless, the church would like to bring its long-sundered sons and daughters home again. During the first papal visit to Japan last February, John Paul II pointedly embraced four Kakure who turned out to greet him and held a meeting with a number of the sect's chief priests. But one of those who greeted the Pope, Dominico Hayakichi Masuyama, 73, says they had come only to "register the fact that we exist. We have no interest in joining his church." After all, he adds solemnly, "we, and nobody else, are true Christians."

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