From Intersect Magazine – September 1994
Photographer Kei Orihara first happened upon the village of Shitsu in the Sotome region on a drive up the coast north of Nagasaki. As the road veered away from the sea cliffs into a valley riddled with rifts and ridges, she took a side road that led to a church on a hill. A plaque noted that parishioners had built this house of worship in 1882 with funds donated by its priest, Father Marco de Rotz. Orihara was especially intrigued by a beautiful and very Japanese display of ikebana (arranged flowers) on the altar. She returned at dawn to witness morning mass, which was as simple and as fervent as a Christmas service she’d once observed in a remote Italian village. The difference was that this roomful of wrinkled, sun-blackened fishermen with their wives, of boys with old-fashioned buzz cuts and girls in traditional bangs—this village congregation who made Jesus, the Virgin Mary and St. Paul central to their lives in the late twentieth century—were Japanese.
Only later did the photographer learn that terrible religious persecution had forced the region’s inhabitants to practice their faith in secret over centuries.
Their travails began when Christianity first reached these shores in 1549 in the person of Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier. The region grew in influence over the next half century, but Japan’s military leadership came to see it as a threat. In 1597 the backlash began as 26 Christians—both foreigners and Japanese—were crucified at Nagasaki. After the turn of the century, the Tokugawa family came to power and moved to stamp out Christianity in Japan. Martyrdom became the fate of over three thousand Catholics, many of them in the Sotome region. The fact that the faithful of that time were prone to view martyrdom as the ultimate profession of love for God and unflinchingly embraced death over renunciation drove the authorities into a frenzy. The persecuted faith went underground and Sotome, due in part to the opportunities for concealment afforded by its serrated, irregular landscape, was successful in keeping the forbidden practices and beliefs of Christianity alive.
Believers had to make strange and macabre adaptations to contend with the adverse circumstances. Because Buddhist purification rites as well as ritual apostasy (fumi-e, “treading on an image” of Mary or Jesus) were regularly forced upon the population, the authorities believed they had vanquished the enemy religion, but villagers would afterward atone by, for example, flailing themselves with whips. During the 250 years during which a pretense of Buddhist belief had to be maintained, extreme measures were resorted to. In the case of a funeral, the corpse would be receiving the official Buddhist rites in one room while relatives hidden next door chanted Christian prayers to counteract them; later they would remove the remains from the casket, discard the Buddhist trappings, and accord the departed one a secret Christian burial.
Over time, the beliefs of some of these “hidden Christians” became so divorced from the source that the influence of indigenous Shinto and Buddhist practices and concepts naturally pervaded the resultant vacuum, transforming the faith into something European Christians would be hard pressed to recognize. In fact, when Japan opened up in the nineteenth century and Catholic missionaries once again came to the village, some two hundred members of the kakure-Kirishitan (“hidden Christian”) group chose to maintain their practices and faith without renewing links with their European counterparts, and a number oftheir descendants continue to remain aloof from Rome. A local folk museum contains a copy of the Oratorio that had been passed down through the seven generations of Catholics who had to practice their faith covertly; to a non-resident, its amalgam of Portuguese, Latin, and Japanese is virtually indecipherable.
The centuries of Japanese history that preceded the arrival of Francis Xavier were marked by savage, inconclusive civil war. The miseries incurred as a result of that fighting no doubt enhanced receptivity to the notion of a faith that transcended the worldly. Possibly the poverty of the region made the people especially responsive to tales of the succor and glory to be savored through faith in Christ.
Over the past few decades, rapid economic growth has constituted by far the gravest threat to the Sotome region and the continuity of its tradition. Unable to make a decent living at agriculture, the young move away hoping to embrace the prosperous urban life they see on television. Hillsides where neatly terraced rice paddies once gleamed in the sun are now overrun by wild bushes, weeds, and trees.
Among those who remain, commitment to the faith may yet lead to the convent or monastery. As the photographs presented here indicate, the synthesis between Japanese and Christian elements in the architecture and lifestyle of the village is absolute; each has seeped so deeply into the other that they are inextricable. If in contemporary Japan, as Juzo Itami has observed, most people only go back to their ancestral village when near relatives die, what awaits them in Sotome is a burial rather than the cremation that is mandated virtually everywhere else. A wooden cross bearing the deceased’s Christian name will most likely be erected beside the stone tablet marking off the family plot. A cycle that began with baptism and probably embraced marriage will now draw to a close in the very church that it began. In the developed world of the late twentieth century, that kind of continuity over the course of a single generation is becoming rare enough. For most of the residents of a village in western Japan to have sustained it over centuries seems nothing short of miraculous.