A century ago the first Protestant missionaries set foot in Japan.† What they found was not merely indifference or suspicion, but a ferocious hatred of Christianity that had been fostered by three centuries of relentless persecution. In last week's Christian Century, Presbyterian Missionary Richard H. Drummond tells of the all-but-forgotten martyrdom of Japan's first Christians.
Death by the Pit. When St. Francis Xavier and a small group of Portuguese Jesuits introduced the Japanese to Christianity in 1549, their success was striking: in only a little more than a generation there were between 300,000 and 600,000 Christians in the country, which had only a third of its present 91.6 million population. (About half a million are now Christian.) Buddhism was in decline; people were impressed by the Jesuits' European science and their surprising concern for social morality and the sanctity of human life. The success of the new religion soon convinced Japan's feudal warlords that Jesus Christ was dangerous competition, and they went to work with social pressure, torture and slaughter.
When decapitation and crucifixion were not effective, the shoguns invented tsurushi, in which the victim was suspended head downward in a pit, often partly filled with offal, to hang in agony sometimes a week or more before dying. "The persecuters were well aware that entire districts would be depopulated if all Christians were killed," says Drummond, "and so from the beginning they aimed to make apostates rather than martyrs." Many Japanese preferred to give up their Christianity. But a surprising number held out to the death. In Shimabara 36,000 men, women and children, offered the way to freedom if they renounced their faith, chose to be killed instead. In one district, not a single Christian was spared. Says Drummond: "More than 13% of all Japanese Christians lost their lives for the sake of their faith, a proportion probably unequaled elsewhere in all the annals of the church."
Villainous Christians. In the 19th century, when Townsend Harris, the first U.S. consul, was working out the first commercial treaty with Japan, the main difficulties he met concerned religious freedom for foreigners. Persecution of Japanese Christians was modified somewhat in 1871, when a Japanese diplomatic mission to the U.S. and Europe was greeted by a storm of indignation at the recent deportation of 60 Christian heads of families in the Nagasaki* area. In 1873 the shogunate removed the notices posted in every Japanese marketplace and on street corners threatening death to anyone who turned Christian or harbored Christians. But until the end of World War II, Christianity was systematically associated with evildoing; "men now still in their 20s can remember how only a few years ago a Christian . . . was a favorite villain in stories for children."