Japan, a Land of Martyrs, is Still a Missionary Land - A Brief Overview

 Pastoral Visit to Japan

On Sunday, September 17, Cardinal Fernando Filoni, prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples – Japan falls under this dicastery’s responsibility because it is a mission land – began his pastoral visit to the Land of the Rising Sun that will end on September 26.

For the occasion, the sovereign pontiff wrote a letter to the Japanese bishops. Vatican Radio explains that Francis mentioned in his letter:

[the] high rate of divorce, the number of suicides, even among young people, and the phenomenon of the ‘hikikomori’ – people who choose to live completely disconnected from society.

The pope also described the evils afflicting the country like almost all consumerist societies: “religious and spiritual formalism, moral relativism, indifference towards religion, an obsession for work and earning.”

Francis ended his letter by recalling that the true evangelical strength of the Japanese Church comes from the fact it is a Church of martyrs and confessors of the Faith, and “this is a great asset to be safe-guarded and developed.”

In 2012, according to the statistics of Aide à l’Eglise en Détresse (Help to the Church in Distress), Japan had only 537,000 faithful, or less than 0.5% of the population.

A Brief History of Japanese Catholicism 

St. Francis Xavier was the first missionary to the country, landing in August 1549 in Kagoshima. With him and in his footsteps, many Jesuits and Franciscans succeeded in spreading Christianity in the country, all the while creating schools, parishes and hospitals. But in 1587, all the missionaries were expelled and the persecutions began.

History has kept alive the memory of the Nagasaki persecution in 1597; 26 Christians were crucified on February 5, on a hill facing the sea. The group included young and old people, laymen and religious.

On September 10, 1622, again in Nagasaki, 22 Christians were burned alive and 30 decapitated in what is known as the “Great Martyrdom”. They were all beatified in 1627 by Pope Urban VIII and canonized on June 8, 1862, by Pope Pius IX. Their feastday in Japan is celebrated on February 6.

After Japan was completely closed in 1640, a small group survived underground – “the hidden Christians” – until the country was reopened in the middle of the 19th century.

Nonetheless, the influence of the Catholic Church on society is far greater than her mere numbers, as Marie Malzac for the newspaper La Croix explains. With her 24 hospitals, 500 kindergartens and 19 universities, she currently enjoys “significant popularity.”

The Japanese Church is also one of the few organisms actively working for a reconciliation between the Japanese and the Chinese, as well as between the Japanese and the Koreans; these relations still bear the mark of the atrocities committed during World War II, points out the editor-in-chief of Eglises d’Asie. The bishops of the archipelago thus meet twice a year with their Korean counterparts to discuss these matters.