ABSTRACT
Terao Kazuyoshi first places this development in the broader context of Japanese Christianity's relatively modest involvement in psychotherapy and counselling movements and practices after 1945, before going on to examine Catholic Naikan meditation as a modern form of spiritual care. Catholic spirituality has been attracting more and more attention in recent years from such people as the literary critic Wakamatsu Eisuke, who was baptized Catholic as a baby and has written lively pieces aimed at the rehabilitation of Catholicism in Japan. His focus has been on exchanges with the dead in the real world, through cultivating the sense that the phenomena of Christian world are in some sense underpinned by the dead. If intellectual currents such as these from outside the church could be made to resonate sympathetically with existing movements within the church, Fujiwara's Catholic Naikan meditation might begin to make significant headway.
