This post is going to jump around all over the place...

I'm reading at the moment a very interesting biography of Michel de Montaigne, the progression of whose famous Essays is apparently more akin to a series of whirlpools and eddies than to a flow. Rather than tidy all this up, therefore, I thought I'd take the indirect approach as well.

So, on Tuesday (two days ago), we visited Suwa Shrine, which dates back to the early years of the 1600s. It is a very beautiful place, and while we were there, we just enjoyed the views and the tranquillity:




It wasn't until after our visit that I realized the full religious significance of this shrine.

I talked yesterday about the arrival of Christianity in Kyushu. Well, the Suwa Shrine was erected to provide a distraction from this new religion.

The problem was that the Christian faith was becoming very, very popular. It was only in 1549 that Francis Xavier introduced Christianity to Kyushu, but a scant half-century later, Nagasaki's population was predominantly Christian.

No harm in that, you might say. But religions never travel empty-handed. They carry huge backpacks, full of social and cultural and political associations. According to this source, the ships, residences, and material culture of foreign countries made Nagasaki quite unique: "[The city] looked like a Portuguese colony, 'a Macao in Japan.' It was, in fact, called a Japanese Rome." When Toyotomi Hideyoshi came to power in Japan in 1585, he began to push back: "It is said that Toyotomi thought the Portuguese were propagating Christianity simply as a means for fulfilling their territorial ambition against Japan." Well, you can't really blame him for thinking that...

By the end of the 16th century, most of the Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines in the Nagasaki area had been destroyed, and Japan's rulers started to enact "increasingly harsh measures to suppress and eradicate Christianity which they had come to view as dangerous and a threat to their power". This is the context in which the 26 Christians, some of them mere children, were crucified in Nagasaki in 1597.

Positives always need to accompany negatives, so the authorities began to rebuild Nagasaki's shrines and temples. Initially, their attempts were held up by Christian sabotage, but in 1623, Aoki Kensei, a wandering ascetic, became the first priest of Suwa Shrine, and he succeeded in putting it on a firm footing (possibly aided by funds from the Shogunate). Aoki and his sons established an important yearly festival, the Kunchi Matsuri, which is still celebrated today.

But more coercive methods were also employed to steer people away from the now-banned Christianity. Every resident was required to register at the shrine. If you didn't, you were considered to be a Christian, and that meant harsh punishment.

In the southwestern parts of Kyushu, including Nagasaki, this policy resulted in civil war. But the Shimabara Uprising, which lasted from 1637 to 1638, only succeeded in adding fuel to the suppression policy.



This all made interesting reading, but today there was another clue from our visit to the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum. We saw several good exhibitions, but the one that's relevant here is the beautiful collection of paintings depicting churches in Nagasaki and environs. The accompanying notes talked about "hidden Christians" -- people who had held on to their faith despite all the persecution.

So, I started to read up about them too.

Central to the authorities' efforts to wipe out Christianity root and branch were the "fumie". These were brass images depicting Jesus or Mary. Everyone who lived in Nagasaki had to go through the annual practice of stepping on the fumie (the idea being that Christians would refuse to put their feet on their objects of reverence). Some Christians did indeed refuse, and were executed, often in particularly nasty ways. Others pretended to deny their faith, but kept it safe in their hearts and in the privacy of their families. They eventually became known as "kakure kirishitan" or hidden Christians. ("Kirishitan", by the way, comes from the Portuguese Christao, or Christian -- I'm reminded of the Portuguese-heritage communities we'd come across in Melaka and Bangkok, which both talk of Kristang or Christang.)

The kakure kirishitan would secretly practise Christian rites such as baptism, secretly give their children Portuguese Christian names, secretly celebrate the Christian festivals... I can only begin to imagine the psychological toll this must have taken. So much guilt, so much fear, so much caution, generation after generation... Finally came Japan's reopening. In 1858, the practice of stepping on the fumie was abolished in Nagasaki. In 1873, the ban on Christianity was lifted. According to one expert: "When Japan opened up its borders again, around 20,000 Christians reappeared and came out of hiding." In Uragami, to the north of Nagasaki, it is reported that 80 per cent of the villagers had secretly kept on believing in Catholicism through all those centuries of oppression. Quite astonishing.

Some of the hidden practices, which developed autonomously in a kind of vacuum, are still extant, and a really, really interesting itinerary (if we ever have the privilege of visiting Kyushu again) would be to visit some of the old sites associated with the Christians...



Reading about the fumie, and the terrible choices facing Christians, I was reminded of a play I'd seen when I was a student at Manchester University. I could remember that it dealt with this period of persecution in Japan. I could remember that I'd found it very powerful, pregnant with the big questions all good art makes us ask: "What would you have done? How would you have justified what you did? How would you have lived (or died) thereafter?"

But I couldn't remember a single detail of the title or the playwright's name.

The internet's great, isn't it? My search terms were very vague, so it took a bit of effort, but finally it became clear. Playing at the Royal Exchange Theatre from 16 November to 17 December 1977 was The Golden Country, written by Shusaku Endo, and directed by Richard Negri. A three-act work, it was a companion piece to Endo's novel Silence.

I must admit I experienced a little shiver at relocating this memory of nigh-on 50 years ago. Of course, I now have to revisit this play and this book. More for the reading list...

In the meantime, a couple more pictures from Suwa Shrine to finish with: