ABSTRACT
When Catholic missionaries of the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris (hereafter MEP) were permitted to enter Japan in 1859, over two hundred years after the last priest had been expelled, they heard rumours that the Catholic Church founded by Jesuit Francis Xavier in the 1550s had survived. From 1614, when an edict was passed banning the religion, a sector of the Christian population of Japan had gone ‘underground’. These Senpuku Kirishitan (‘Secret Christians’) clandestinely practised their faith. 1 Following the expulsion of priests and the intensification of persecutions in 1639, they had developed a hierarchy and organizational network to maintain the religion. In 1865 the rumours of survival were confirmed: Domingo Mataichi, a ‘baptizer’ (mizukata), or lay Christian leader, approached the French priest Bernard Petitjean, recited prayers and repeated the Latin baptismal formula. He also presented the priest with a handwritten copy of the Tenchi Hajimari no Koto (‘Beginning of Heaven and Earth’) – a compendium of religious stories which had served as the Gospel of the Senpuku Kirishitan and which apparently had been transmitted in oral form since its composition in the late seventeenth century. 2 In his subsequent evangelical strategy Petitjean attempted to be sensitive to many of the traditions which had evolved over the long period of Japanese isolation, using, for example, the Tenchi as the basis for a new catechism. 3 However, for him and for many of his colleagues, the religious devotions of the Kirishitan were too close to Shinto rites, and their beliefs were superstitious distortions of Catholic teachings. In the analysis of most missionaries, these Japanese Kirishitan, deprived of sacerdotal guidance for so long, had ceased to be Catholic. Yet offered the opportunity after 1873 to ‘rejoin’ the Catholic Church by renouncing condemned customs, many Kirishitan refused. They called on the testimony of their ancestors, whose stubborn perseverance in the faith through centuries of desperation bore witness to their rectitude. They argued that the countless miracles and divine favours obtained through their ceremonies belied the missionary slander that these rites were offensive to God. Whatever the new French priests might say, they would continue to guard the flame of Xavier’s Catholicism. They were the ‘Old Christians’ (Kyū Kirishitan), ready now to resist suspicious ‘innovations’ brought by these Europeans, and ready to protect their heritage. 4
