The Church in Japan (1549-2026)

Saint Francis Xavier Lands at Kagoshima (August 15, 1549)

The story begins on August 15, 1549, the solemnity of the Assumption, when Saint Francis Xavier, SJ (1506-1552), boarded a Chinese junk in the bay of Kagoshima, in the far south of Japan. With him were two Jesuits — Father Cosme de Torres and Brother Juan Fernández — and a Japanese convert from Malacca, Anjirō (baptized Paul of Holy Faith), the first “missionary interpreter” of the new country. Xavier had come from Goa, where he was superior of the young Society of Jesus for the East Indies and where he had heard Anjirō tell him that his Japanese compatriots were “better than all known peoples”^[6].

Three months after his arrival, Xavier wrote a now-famous letter to the Society of Jesus in Goa, dated November 5, 1549, from Kagoshima:

“The people we have met so far are the best that have been discovered to date, and it seems to me that among the pagans we will never find another race equal to the Japanese.”
— Saint Francis Xavier, letter to the Society of Jesus in Goa, Kagoshima, November 5, 1549^[7]

This assessment, copied and circulated throughout the nascent Society, aroused throughout Europe a missionary enthusiasm for the archipelago. The full episode — landing, first baptisms, translation of the name of God (the perilous Dainichi abandoned for Latinized Deus), apostolate at Hirado, Yamaguchi, and Kyoto, and finally the decision to depart for China where Xavier died in 1552 — is detailed in the specialized article The Jesuit Missions in Japan (1549-1644), which continues the story up to the great reversal of Toyotomi Hideyoshi and the sakoku.

A Promising Nation in the Eyes of the Missionary

Why such extraordinary esteem for Japan? Xavier himself explains it: honesty, cleanliness, thirst for learning, respect for hierarchies, rejection of crude idolatry, and the sense of honorable suicide (seppuku), which he saw as proof of a keen moral conscience. More deeply, he observed that the Japan of the daimyō (feudal lords) was entering a period of religious instability: Buddhist sects (Jōdo Shinshū, Nichiren, Zen Rinzai) competed for souls, imperial Shintō remained disorganized, and some daimyō sought a spiritual and commercial foothold in the arrival of the Portuguese. Christianity found an unexpected fertile ground.

Cosme de Torres, Valignano, and the Golden Age of Christian Daimyō

After Xavier’s departure (November 1551), Father Cosme de Torres led the mission until his death in 1570. It was under him, then under Visitor Alessandro Valignano, SJ (1539-1606), who arrived in 1579, that the Japanese mission reached its peak. Valignano imposed a strict policy of accommodation: missionaries learned the language, adopted the food and dress of Buddhist monks (then Zen bonzes), built seminaries (Arima, Azuchi, Nagasaki), and published grammars and catechisms in kana on the Jesuit presses — Christian Japanese printing preceded secular domestic printing by several decades. The conversions of the great daimyō — Ōmura Sumitada (1563, first baptized daimyō, Christian name Don Bartholomew), Ōtomo Sōrin (1578, Don Francisco), Konishi Yukinaga, Justo Takayama Ukon — led to those of their vassals and peasants. Around 1582, there were nearly 150,000 Japanese Christians; by 1614, on the eve of the great persecution, they numbered about 300,000 out of a total population of 18 million, nearly 1.7% of the country^[8]. No modern Jesuit mission ever achieved such a proportion of baptized to population in so few decades.

The Tenshō Embassy to Europe (1582–1590)

The most spectacular event of this golden age was the Tenshō Embassy (天正遣欧少年使節): four young Japanese Christians — Itō Mancio, Chijiwa Miguel, Hara Martino, Nakaura Julião — sent to Europe by the three Christian daimyō of Kyūshū, accompanied by Father Valignano. Departing Nagasaki in February 1582, they traveled through Macao, Goa, the Cape, Lisbon, Madrid (received by Philip II in November 1584), then arrived in Rome on 22 March 1585, where they were received in a public consistory by Pope Gregory XIII^[9]. The event shook European capitals and inspired even a solemn te deum at Saint Peter’s. They returned to Japan in 1586 and arrived back in 1590, after eight years away — to find a mission already under the first anti-Christian edict of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1587).

Hideyoshi’s Edict (24 July 1587) and the 26 Martyrs of Nagasaki (5 February 1597)

On 24 July 1587 (11th day of the 6th month of the 15th year of Tenshō), Toyotomi Hideyoshi, then kanpaku (imperial regent) and master of Japan, issued an eleven-article edict ordering the expulsion of Christian missionaries within twenty days, without forbidding private faith. Hideyoshi accused the Jesuits of forced conversions on the lands of Christian daimyō and of threatening Japanese cultural unity. Enforcement was initially lax. But the incident of the San Felipe galleon (October 1596), shipwrecked at Urado, whose Spanish pilot allegedly imprudently boasted of missionary strategy as a prelude to military conquest, provided a pretext for a demonstration.

On 5 February 1597, on Nishizaka Hill in Nagasaki, 26 Christians — 6 Franciscan missionaries (4 Spaniards, 1 Mexican: Saint Philip of Jesus, 1 Portuguese Indian), 3 Japanese Jesuits including Saint Paul Miki, and 17 Japanese laypeople including three children (Louis Ibaraki, 12; Anthony of Nagasaki, 13; Thomas Kozaki, 14) — were crucified and pierced with lances. Beatified by Urban VIII on 14 September 1627, they were canonized by Pius IX on 8 June 1862^[10]. Before dying, from the top of his cross, Paul Miki preached a final homily to the people in which he declared forgiveness for his executioners “as Christ forgave his executioners” — the full text preserved by the Italian Jesuit Luís Fróis, Historia de Japam^[11].

The Great Tokugawa Persecution (1614–1639)

Hideyoshi died in 1598; Tokugawa Ieyasu unified Japan in 1600 (Battle of Sekigahara) and founded the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603. Initially tolerant — even signing trade treaties with the Spanish and Dutch — he shifted stance from 1612 onward. On 27 January 1614 (18th day of the 12th month of the 18th year of Keichō), he issued the Expulsion Edict of the Bateren (バテレン追放令, bateren being the transliteration of padre), ordering the total expulsion of missionaries and destruction of churches^[12]. Religious orders were expelled; those who remained clandestinely (mostly Jesuits, but also Dominicans and Franciscans) were systematically hunted.

This marked the beginning of the longest modern Christian persecution: a quarter-century of public tortures designed to break faith. The pit (ana-tsurushi) — where Christians were hung upside down in a hole filled with excrement, sometimes for days, to break their resistance without killing them too quickly — the fumi-e (画踏) — bronze plaques engraved with the image of Christ or the Virgin that suspects had to trample to prove apostasy — the boiling baths of the Unzen hot springs, slow burnings: the Tokugawa experimented with a scientific state persecution, whose most spectacular apostasy was that of the Portuguese Jesuit Cristóvão Ferreira (1633) — mission provincial tortured until publicly abjuring — which became for Rome the greatest missionary wound of the modern era.

“The authorities of Japan do not content themselves with killing Christians: they seek by all means to make them renounce their faith. It is a kind of persecution unprecedented in the Church.” — Report of the Japan Provincial Francesco Pacheco, SJ, to Rome, 1622^[13]

The numbers are staggering. On the single day of 10 September 1622, known as the “Great Martyrdom of Nagasaki”, 55 Christians were executed at Nishizaka — 30 beheaded, 25 burned alive. The Japanese Dominican sister Lucy de Freitas, Spanish Franciscan Francisco de Sainte-Marie, and Italian Jesuit Carlo Spinola died together there^[14]. Of the 205 martyrs beatified by Pius IX in 1867, sixty-six belong to this persecution.

The Shimabara Rebellion (1637–1638) and the Final Sakoku

The final blow came from a social and religious uprising: the Shimabara Rebellion (1637–1638). At Shimabara, on the Kyūshū peninsula, and on the nearby island of Amakusa, peasants burdened by taxes, led by a visionary teenager nicknamed Amakusa Shirō, took refuge in the ruins of Hara Castle in December 1637. For four months, 37,000 Christian peasants resisted 125,000 shogunate soldiers. On 12 April 1638, the castle fell; the survivors — women, children, elderly — were massacred without exception (between 27,000 and 37,000 dead according to sources). Christian banners, rosaries, and sacred images were found in the ruins^[15].

The following year, in 1639, shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu issued the sakoku-rei — the edict of “national seclusion” which forbade Japanese from leaving the archipelago under penalty of death, closed all ports to European ships (only the Protestant Dutch retained a confined trading post on the artificial island of Dejima in Nagasaki), and instituted the annual system of fumi-e in all villages of Kyūshū. Japanese Christianity then seemed eradicated.

More Than Two Centuries Without Clergy (1639-1865)

The Tokugawa believed they had eradicated Christianity. The last Jesuit present in Japan, Mancio Konishi, was executed in 1644^[16]. No Catholic priest set foot on the archipelago for 221 years—an unprecedented record of a Christian community deprived of clergy in the entire history of the Church. Yet, Japanese Christianity did not disappear. Hidden in remote hamlets of Kyūshū—Sotome north of Nagasaki, the Gotō archipelago, the islands of Hirado and Ikitsuki—passed down from father to son, mother to daughter, the secret was transmitted without clergy, without the Eucharist, without confession.

A clandestine lay organization was established to compensate for the absence of priests. In each community there was:

• a chōkata (帳方), guardian of the liturgical calendar, who memorized the feasts of the Tempo no Pira—a handwritten liturgical calendar transcribed from the 17th century;
• a mizukata (水方), administrator of baptism by water alone, preserved as a sacrament transmissible without a priest;
• a kikiyaku (聞役), listener of grievances and intra-community arbitrator;
• oral prayers transmitted without writing, mixing distorted Latin (Maruya for Maria, Deusu for Deus, Hiriya for Filia) and classical Japanese.

Maria Kannon and the Faith Passed On

To disguise their worship, the hidden Christians repurposed Buddhist statues of Kannon (the goddess of mercy, Avalokiteśvara in Mahāyāna Buddhism) who sometimes holds a child: openly venerated as a legitimate Buddhist statue, Maria Kannon in reality became a disguised representation of the Virgin Mary. Under the roof, in hidden altars, medals and reliquaries of Saint Apollonia, Saint Anthony of Padua, and rosaries made of shell beads circulated.

“The grace of God wrought this unheard-of miracle: for more than two centuries, without a church, without a priest, without the Eucharist, without confession, without confirmation, without any outside help, a portion of the Japanese people kept the Christian faith alive by transmitting it through baptized women and heads of families alone.” — Bernard Petitjean, letter of March 18, 1865^[17]

Not everything remained pure. Cut off from the clergy, some communities drifted from doctrine: a gradual confusion between the Virgin and the goddess Kannon, loss of the meaning of the Mass and ministerial priesthood, a shift toward a strictly domestic religion. This is why, after the “rediscovery” of 1865, some descendants of the kakure kirishitan (notably those of Ikitsuki, more isolated) refused to rejoin the Roman Catholic communion to remain in their syncretic version: today they are called hanare kirishitan (“separated Christians”)—recent reports count only a few hundred, aging: in November 2019, Reuters noted on Ikitsuki Island that many fear being the last generation of their line^[18].

March 17, 1865, at Ōura — the “Miracle of the East”

The Tokugawa Japan was opening up under American pressure (Perry treaties of 1854) and signed commercial treaties with Western powers in 1858. Nagasaki became an international port again where Catholic missionaries could reside—but Japanese Christianity remained legally banned.

On January 18, 1864, Fathers Bernard Petitjean (1829–1884) and Louis Furet of the Paris Foreign Missions Society arrived in Nagasaki. They purchased land at Ōura, on the foreign concession, and built a neo-Gothic church dedicated to the 26 martyrs, consecrated on February 19, 1865 by Mgr Girard. Officially, the church served only foreign residents and sailors. Japanese approaching it still risked death.

On March 17, 1865, around one o’clock in the afternoon—it was the Friday before Palm Sunday—Father Petitjean, alone in his church, saw about fifteen humble peasants (men, women, children) from the neighboring Urakami district enter, gazing at the statue of the Virgin and Child placed near the choir. One of them, a mature woman named Isabelina Yuri Sugimoto, knelt beside Petitjean and whispered in Japanese:

“The heart of all of us here is the same as yours.” — Isabelina Yuri Sugimoto to Father Petitjean, Ōura, March 17, 1865^[19]

Petitjean understood he was facing descendants of the Christians of 1614, faithful for two hundred and twenty-one years. The woman immediately asked to see “Sancta Maria-sama”—confirming that Petitjean recognized the Virgin—then inquired about the pope of Rome and the celibacy of priests: three theological identification criteria orally transmitted since the 17th-century Jesuits. Petitjean immediately sent the news to Paris, which caused an extraordinary stir in Europe. Upon hearing the news, Pope Pius IX exclaimed, according to Cardinal Antonelli’s testimony: “It is a miracle of the East!”^[20].

In the following weeks, tens of thousands of hidden Christians gradually revealed themselves—first in Kyūshū, then in the remote villages of the Gotō, Hirado, and Ikitsuki islands. It is estimated that at least 20,000 descendants of the kakure joined the Roman Catholic communion between 1865 and 1873.

The Urakami Yoban Kuzure (1867–1873) — the Fourth and Final Persecution

The dying Tokugawa shogunate would not tolerate this resurrection. From 1867, Christians of Urakami were again arrested en masse: this was the fourth persecution of Urakami (浦上四番崩れ, Urakami yoban kuzure), the harshest. 3,414 Christians of Urakami were arrested under the dying shogunate and, after the Meiji Restoration of January 1868—which nevertheless maintained the ban on Christianity—were exiled to 21 feudal domains across Japan: Tsuwano, Hagi, Fukuyama, Kagoshima, Toyama. About 660 died in the camps from hunger, cold, and torture^[21].

The new Meiji government sent the Iwakura Mission to the West in 1871–1873 to renegotiate the unequal treaties. But in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome, its diplomats were met not with compliments but with indignant protests over the treatment of the Urakami Christians: it was impossible for Western Christian nations to sign treaties on equal terms with a state that persecuted the Christian faith. Tokyo yielded.

The Decree of February 24, 1873, and Gradual Opening

On February 24, 1873 (太政官布告第68号, Dajōkan fukoku dai-68-gō — Grand Council of State Notification No. 68), the Meiji government ordered the removal throughout the territory of public notice boards (kōsatsu) forbidding Christianity. On March 14, 1873, the order was given for the repatriation of the exiles from Urakami; approximately 1,930 survivors returned to the country.

⚠️ The text of February 24, 1873, is not an edict of religious freedom^[22]. It merely abolished the public prohibition of Christianity. Full formal religious freedom would only be recognized with Article 28 of the Meiji Constitution of February 11, 1889, and even then under the restrictive proviso “insofar as it does not disturb public peace and is not contrary to the duties of subjects toward the Emperor.” But in practice, from 1873 onward, no Japanese Christian would be arrested for their faith.

From the Apostolic Vicariate in Japan (1846) to the Hierarchy of Leo XIII (June 15, 1891)

Canonically, the Holy See had already begun to rebuild the structure. On May 17, 1846, Gregory XVI erected the Apostolic Vicariate of Japan, entrusted to the Paris Foreign Missions Society — even though no missionary could enter the country at that time. This was a pioneering legal decision: Rome affirmed that Japan was not a newly pagan land but a Christian land whose evangelization must be restored.

Once the persecution was lifted, the structure quickly grew denser: division into four apostolic vicariates on May 22, 1888; then, on June 15, 1891, Leo XIII issued the bull formally erecting the Japanese Catholic hierarchy. Tokyo became a metropolitan archdiocese, with three suffragans: Nagasaki, Osaka, and Hakodate (future Sapporo). The first archbishop of Tokyo was Mgr Pierre-Marie Osouf, MEP (1843–1906), who had arrived in Japan as early as 1873; the first residential bishop of Nagasaki was Mgr Jules-Alphonse Cousin, MEP^[23].

Pierre-Marie Osouf and the First Bishops

Osouf built the first Saint Francis Xavier Cathedral in Kanda (Tokyo), completed in 1899 — destroyed by American raids in 1945. Under him, the Japanese episcopate remained exclusively French for two decades. The Japanization of the clergy began only in 1927 with the consecration of Mgr Januarius Hayasaka, the first Japanese bishop (Nagasaki), followed in 1937 by Mgr Peter Tatsuo Doi (Tokyo), who was made cardinal by John XXIII in 1960 — the first Japanese cardinal in history^[24].

Pius IX Canonizes the 26 Martyrs (June 8, 1862)

On June 8, 1862, on the solemnity of Pentecost, Pius IX canonized at Saint Peter’s in Rome the 26 Martyrs of Nagasaki — the first saints of the Catholic Church in East Asia and the first Far Eastern martyrs canonized in the modern era. The canonization bull “Ad sacram beati Petri Apostolorum principis Sedem”^[25] highlights the heroic fidelity of these martyrs and extols their shed blood as “the seed of Christians” — a direct quotation from Tertullian (Apologeticum, L, 13)^[26].

A providential coincidence: the canonization took place less than three years before the “resurrection” of Ōura (March 17, 1865). As if Heaven attested to the holiness of the dead just before revealing the fidelity of the living. Since 1969, February 6 in the Roman liturgical calendar is now the feast of Saints Paul Miki and companions, martyrs.

Foreign Missions, Education, and the Birth of Catholic Universities

The Paris Foreign Missions Society (MEP), the Fathers of Saint-Sulpice, the Dominicans, the Franciscans, the Lazarists, and the Salesians arrived in great numbers. From 1908, the Jesuits returned to Japan — by personal decision of Pope Pius X, who asked them to found a major Catholic university in Tokyo. This led to the founding, in 1913, of Sophia University (上智大学, Jōchi Daigaku — “University of Higher Wisdom”), recognized by the Japanese state in 1928 as the first Catholic university in Japan^[27]. In 1932, the Verbites (Society of the Divine Word, SVD) founded in Nagoya the future Nanzan University (南山大学), recognized as a university in 1949 — today home to the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, one of the world’s leading centers for Christian-Buddhist dialogue.

Japanese Confucian Rites and the Instruction Plane compertum est (1939)

One theological knot remained from the Chinese Rites Controversy (see the article The Chinese Rites Controversy): could Japanese Christians be allowed to participate in Confucian civil ceremonies honoring Confucius and ancestors in public schools and imperial ceremonies? Under Pius XI and Pius XII, Rome ruled in favor of a prudent inculturation. On December 8, 1939, the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith issued the instruction Plane compertum est, which distinguished the civil rite, permitted, from the idolatrous religious rite, condemned^[28]. This text, by strict parallel with China, freed Japanese Christians from a persistent dilemma: a Catholic official or soldier could now participate in public Shintō ceremonies held as civil rites without a crisis of conscience.

Arrival on April 24, 1930

On April 24, 1930, the Polish Conventual Franciscan Maximilian-Marie Kolbe (1894-1941) arrived in Nagasaki with four confreres, traveling via the Trans-Siberian Railway. His mission, approved in Rome, was to establish in Asia the “Militia Immaculatae” (Militia of the Immaculate), founded in Rome in 1917, whose spirituality is based on total consecration to the Virgin Mary and the promotion of Marian apostolate through the press.

In Nagasaki, Kolbe presented himself to Bishop Januarius Hayasaka, the first Japanese bishop. He proposed a deal: “I am a professor of philosophy; I can teach at the seminary; in exchange, grant me permission to launch a magazine.”^[29] Hayasaka agreed. One month later, in May 1930, the first Japanese issue of 無原罪の聖母の騎士 (Mugenzai no Seibo no Kishi — “Knight of the Immaculate”) was published, printed on the lead press Kolbe had brought from Poland, which could not compose any kanji. Initial circulation: 10,000 copies. By 1936, the magazine was printing 50,000 copies monthly — the most widely circulated Catholic publication in Japan.

Mugenzai no Sono — the convent saved by the Virgin

On May 16, 1931, Kolbe inaugurated a Franciscan convent on the slopes of Hongōchi Hill, in the western suburbs of Nagasaki, about 2 km from the future Urakami Cathedral. He named it Mugenzai no Sono (無原罪の園 — “Garden of the Immaculate”). The land was purchased at a very low price: on this west-facing slope, the fūsui (風水, Japanese geomancy) deemed the location unfavorable. The Japanese consulted advised Kolbe to look elsewhere. He refused. “The Virgin has chosen this place,” he said, according to his biographer Maria Winowska^[30].

On August 9, 1945, at 11:02 a.m., the atomic bomb “Fat Man” detonated over Urakami. The explosion destroyed the cathedral and killed 75,000 people. Kolbe’s convent — located on the opposite slope of Hongōchi Hill relative to the hypocenter — was shielded by the rocky mass that blocked the nuclear blast. Some stained glass windows were broken. No friars were killed. The convent immediately became an improvised hospital for survivors burned in the downstream neighborhoods. Today, the convent (renamed Seibo no Kishi, “Knight of the Holy Mother”) still publishes the magazine: its 1000th issue was released in 2021^[31].

Kolbe leaves Japan (May 1936)

On May 26, 1936, Kolbe was recalled to Poland by the provincial chapter to resume leadership of Niepokalanów. Five years later, on August 14, 1941, he died at Auschwitz, after offering himself in place of a family man, Franciszek Gajowniczek, condemned by the SS. Canonized in 1982 by John Paul II as a martyr of charity, he remains for Japan the Polish pilgrim whom the Virgin sent to plant in Nagasaki’s Catholic soil the foundation that would survive the atomic apocalypse.

Urakami, the Catholic capital of Japan

At the beginning of the 20th century, Urakami, a suburb of Nagasaki, had become the largest Catholic community in Japan. The former kakure Christians of Urakami, numbering about 12,000 Catholics around 1945, began building from 1895 a vast neo-Romanesque cathedral of red brick, St. Mary of Urakami (浦上天主堂), inaugurated in 1914 and completed with its two bell towers in 1925. At 26 meters high and 51 meters long, it was then the largest Christian church in East Asia^[32]. The Diocese of Nagasaki — the mother church of Japanese Christianity — counted about 70,000 Catholics in 1945, nearly half of all Catholics in the country.

11:02 a.m. — the destruction of Urakami

On August 9, 1945, at 11:02 a.m. local time, the B-29 bomber Bockscar piloted by Major Charles Sweeney dropped the plutonium atomic bomb “Fat Man” on Nagasaki. The intended target was the Mitsubishi shipyards. Due to clouds covering the city center, the bomb hit the Urakami district, about 500 meters from St. Mary’s Cathedral. The bomb detonated at 500 meters altitude. A fireball of 4,000 °C vaporized everything within a one-kilometer radius. The cathedral, which was to host the Assumption Vigil Mass 30 minutes later (Urakami’s faithful traditionally went to confession en masse before their patronal feast), was razed in a fraction of a second. Two priests in the confessional and about thirty faithful present in the church at that moment were killed instantly^[33].

Of the 12,000 Catholics in Urakami, about 8,500 were killed instantly or in the following days by heat, blast, or radiation — more than two-thirds of the community^[34]. The Diocese of Nagasaki lost in an instant:

Takashi Nagai and the Holocaust Homily (November 23, 1945)

On November 23, 1945, at ten o’clock in the morning, a solemn Requiem Mass was celebrated in the ruins of Urakami Cathedral for the Catholic victims of the bomb. It was the Servant of God Takashi Nagai (1908-1951), a radiologist, baptized in 1934, himself wounded by the bomb and recently having lost his wife Midori (whose rosary he found melted in the ashes), who delivered the homily before the bishop and survivors. He offered the most radical Catholic interpretation of the disaster:

“Is it not Nagasaki that was the chosen victim, the spotless lamb, immolated as a holocaust on the altar of sacrifice, expiating the sins of all the nations engaged in the Second World War?” — Takashi Nagai, homily at the ruins of Urakami Cathedral, November 23, 1945^[35]

This heartbreaking and controversial interpretation gives meaning to the incomprehensible: if the bomb fell on Urakami rather than military Tokyo, if it struck the only Church-city in the entire Christian archipelago, it was — for Nagai — because an Eucharistic expiation was to be offered on behalf of Japan, the United States, and all the belligerents. This idea of hansai (燔祭 — biblical holocaust) remains Nagai’s personal reading, contested by some Japanese Christians who see it as a theological rationalization of an unjust atrocity. It has shaped the Catholic spiritual memory of Nagasaki to this day, without being taken up by the magisterium: coming to Nagasaki in 1981, John Paul II mentions in his words neither Nagai nor this expiatory reading — his homily and his Nishizaka address concern the 17th-century martyrs^[36].

"The Bells of Nagasaki" — Work of the Servant of God

Confined to bed by leukemia caused by radiation exposure he had received as a radiologist before 1945, Takashi Nagai wrote in August 1946 his book 長崎の鐘 (Nagasaki no Kane — The Bells of Nagasaki). Published in 1949 (after the lifting of American occupation censorship), translated into French by Éditions de l'Emmanuel in 2019 under the title The Bells of Nagasaki: Diary of an Atomic Bomb Victim^[37], the book is a short masterpiece (~170 pages) blending medical reportage, autobiography, and Christian meditation. He also published Kono Ko o Nokoshite (この子を残して — Leaving These Children Behind, 1948) — a meditation on his impending death and the future of his two surviving children —, Rozario no Kusari (The Rosary, 1948), and Hanasaku Oka (The Flowering Hill, 1949). Before dying on May 1, 1951 at age 43, he received visits from Helen Keller (October 1948), Emperor Hirohito (1949), and Cardinal Norman Gilroy, Archbishop of Sydney and emissary of the Pope (1949)^[38]. His cause for canonization was officially opened by the Archbishop of Nagasaki Mgr Joseph Mitsuaki Takami in 2021, jointly for Takashi and his wife Midori: they are now Servants of God as Christian spouses^[39].

Diplomatic Resumption and the 1966 Nunciature

The Holy See was one of the few states to maintain diplomatic relations with Imperial Japan during the war: on April 25, 1942, in the midst of the Pacific War, Pius XII established formal diplomatic relations with Tokyo — the first Asian country to conclude such an agreement with the Holy See^[40]. This diplomatic continuity allowed the Japanese Church, from 1945 onward, to be recognized as a legitimate partner by the American occupation authorities and by the new constitutional regime of 1947.

Key milestones:

• November 26, 1919: erection of the Apostolic Delegation to Japan by Benedict XV.
• April 25, 1942: formal diplomatic relations with Imperial Japan.
• April 28, 1952: the Delegation elevated to an Apostolic Internunciature.
• October 24, 1966: elevated to a full Apostolic Nunciature (under Paul VI).

First resident nuncio: Mgr Maximilian de Furstenberg (1958, as delegate)^[41]. In Taipei (Taiwan), the Holy See maintains its nunciature to the Republic of China, but has appointed no nuncio there since 1971: the mission is led by a chargé d’affaires^[42].

Visits of Saint John Paul II (February 23–26, 1981)

From February 23 to 26, 1981, Saint John Paul II made his first apostolic visit to Japan. On February 23, he landed in Tokyo (Haneda); on the 24th, he met Emperor Hirohito at the Imperial Palace and received the diplomatic corps at the Nunciature. On February 25, in Hiroshima, before the Peace Memorial, he delivered the Appeal for Peace, which remains the great papal text of the 20th century on nuclear deterrence:

“War is the work of man. War is the destruction of human life. War is death. Remembering the past is committing oneself to the future. Remembering Hiroshima is abhorring nuclear war. Remembering Hiroshima is committing oneself to peace.” — Saint John Paul II, Appeal for Peace, Hiroshima Memorial, February 25, 1981^[43]

On February 26, 1981, in Nagasaki, under the snow, John Paul II celebrated Mass at Matsuyama-machi during which he ordained 16 priests for the Japanese dioceses, then went to Nishizaka to venerate the 26 martyrs canonized in 1862. At the end of his day, he visited the leprosarium of Tabira and embraced the sick. This day — snow, tears, return to the martyrological source — still marks the Japanese Catholic imagination today. The visit to Nishizaka gave rise to a crucial homily, published in Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, vol. IV/1^[44].

Endō Shūsaku and Silence (1966) — Literary Inculturation

While official pastoral work was recovering, a great Japanese Catholic writer — Endō Shūsaku (遠藤周作, 1923–1996), baptized as Paul in childhood — gave world literature one of the most profound Christian novels of the 20th century: Chinmoku (沈黙 — Silence, 1966), winner of the Tanizaki Prize the same year. Inspired by seeing a fumi-e (image of Christ trampled) during a visit to the Museum of the 26 Martyrs of Nagasaki, the novel features the fictional Portuguese Jesuit Sebastião Rodrigues (modeled on the real Jesuit Giuseppe Chiara, who apostatized in 1643), who went to Japan during the Tokugawa persecution to find his master Cristóvão Ferreira. Subjected to the pit, contemplating the face of Christ on the bronze plaque, Rodrigues hears an inner voice which, in substance, permits him to trample on it: Christ came into the world to be trampled underfoot by men; it is to share their pain that he bore his cross. Rodrigues then sets his foot on the fumi-e (final scene, paraphrased here from Endō Shūsaku, Silence, French translation by Henriette Guex-Rolle, Denoël, 1971)^[45].

Endō’s theological thesis — that Japanese Christianity must become “maternal” (image of the Mater Dolorosa) rather than “paternal” — has been challenged by some Roman theologians who saw it as a concession to Japanese cultural sensibilities rather than a transmission of the Creed. Martin Scorsese adapted the novel into a film in 2016, after twenty-eight years of development: Rodrigues is played by Andrew Garfield, Ferreira by Liam Neeson, and the film introduced the story of the Tokugawa persecution to a global audience.

Beatifications of the Martyrs (1862–1989)

Spread over more than a century, the beatifications and canonizations of Japanese martyrs constitute one of the greatest hagiographical achievements of the modern Church:

The 188 Martyrs Beatified on November 24, 2008

On November 24, 2008, at Nagasaki’s Big-N baseball stadium, before more than 30,000 faithful, Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, Prefect Emeritus of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, beatified on behalf of Benedict XVI 188 martyrs of Japan — Father Pierre Kibe Kasui, SJ (a Japanese Jesuit trained in Rome), and 187 companions: only 5 priests, 183 laypeople, including entire families, women, and children^[46]. Their martyrdom occurred between 1603 and 1639. Methods included decapitation, crucifixion, burning at the stake, and boiling at Unzen. This remains the largest collective beatification of the Catholic Church in Japan to date.

The Beatification of Justo Takayama Ukon (February 7, 2017)

On February 7, 2017, at Osaka-jō Hall (Osaka), before about 10,000 pilgrims, Cardinal Angelo Amato, SDB, Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, beatified on behalf of Pope Francis Justo Takayama Ukon (1552-1615), a Christian daimyō who refused to apostatize under Hideyoshi’s 1587 edict. Stripped of his fiefs in 1588, he was welcomed in Kanazawa by the daimyō Maeda Toshiie, but was definitively exiled by Tokugawa Ieyasu after the 1614 edict. On November 8, 1614, he embarked from Nagasaki with 350 Christians condemned to exile; he arrived in Manila on December 21, 1614, greeted as a hero by Spanish governor Juan de Silva. He died in Manila on February 3, 1615, 44 days after arrival, exhausted by the journey. Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of Manila concelebrated the beatification, emphasizing that Ukon had been “proto-beatified” by the Philippines before anyone else^[47].

The recognized canonical status — a martyrdom consummated not by execution but by the sufferings of exile endured for the faith (the 2016 decree declares him dead in odium fidei in Manila on February 3, 1615)^[48] — is rare and theologically significant: it extends the notion of martyrdom to non-bloody but deadly persecution through exile for the faith.

“Don Justo is a model for Christians today: he refused any compromise with political power to remain faithful to Christ. He preferred to lose everything — fief, castle, lands, honors — rather than deny his faith.” — Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, beatification homily, Osaka, February 7, 2017^[49]

The “Hidden Christian Sites” Inscribed by UNESCO (July 1, 2018)

On July 1, 2018, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, meeting in Manama (Bahrain), inscribed on the World Heritage List the ensemble “Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region” — 12 sites forming the memorial archipelago of hidden Christians in Kyūshū: Remains of Hara Castle; Kasuga Village and Sacred Places in Hirado (Kasuga Village and Mt. Yasumandake); Kasuga Village and Sacred Places in Hirado (Nakaenoshima Island); Sakitsu Village in Amakusa; Shitsu Village in Sotome; Ono Village in Sotome; Villages on Kuroshima Island; Remains of Villages on Nozaki Island; Villages on Kashiragashima Island; Villages on Hisaka Island; Egami Village on Naru Island; Oura Cathedral^[50]. This is Japan’s 18th UNESCO site and the first international recognition of the clandestine Christian resistance from 1644 to 1865 as a heritage of humanity.

Pope Francis’s Visit (November 23-26, 2019)

From November 23 to 26, 2019, Pope Francis visited Japan, following his trip to Thailand. On November 24, 2019, under heavy rain at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Hypocenter Park, he delivered the most significant anti-nuclear speech of his pontificate:

“[…] this place makes us more aware of the suffering and horror that we human beings are capable of inflicting on ourselves. […] The possession of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction is not the most appropriate answer to this desire. On the contrary, it seems to continually put it to the test. Our world is experiencing the perverse dichotomy of wanting to defend and guarantee stability and peace on the basis of a false security supported by a mentality of fear and mistrust […] In today’s world, where millions of children and families live in inhuman conditions, the money spent and the fortunes earned in manufacturing, modernizing, maintaining, and selling ever more destructive weapons are a continual outrage that cries out to heaven.” — Pope Francis, speech at the Hypocenter Park, Nagasaki, November 24, 2019^[51]

That afternoon, Francis traveled to Hiroshima, where before the Peace Memorial, he delivered his most forceful declaration:

“I wish to state again with conviction that the use of atomic energy for military purposes is today more than ever a crime, not only against man and his dignity, but also against any possibility of a future in our common home. […] True peace can only be a disarmed peace.” — Pope Francis, Hiroshima speech, November 24, 2019^[52]

On November 25, 2019, in Tokyo, Francis met Emperor Naruhito at the Imperial Palace and then celebrated Mass at the Tokyo Dome before approximately 50,000 faithful — the largest Catholic celebration in Japanese history.

Cardinal Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi (2024)

On December 7, 2024, Pope Francis created Cardinal Mgr. Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi, SVD (born 1958), Archbishop of Tokyo since 2017. A Verbite and former missionary in Ghana, president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Japan (CBCJ), Kikuchi became the seventh Japanese cardinal in history, after Tatsuo Doi (1960), Paul Yoshigorō Taguchi (1973), Joseph Asajirō Satowaki (1979), Peter Seiichi Shirayanagi (1994), Stephen Fumio Hamao (2003), and Thomas Aquino Manyo Maeda, created cardinal by Francis on June 28, 2018^[53].

On April 21, 2025, Pope Francis died in Rome. At the conclave held from May 7 to 8, 2025, Cardinals Kikuchi (Tokyo) and Maeda (Osaka-Takamatsu) sat among the 133 electors; on May 8, 2025, American Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elected and took the name Leo XIV — the reigning pope^[54].

2024 Statistics — 407,000 Catholics

The official 2024 statistics from the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Japan (CBCJ) depict a minority Church, yet well structured^[55]:

The underlying trend shows a slight decline in Japanese baptisms. However, this is offset—and often surpassed—by the massive presence of foreign resident Catholics: Filipinos, Vietnamese, Brazilian nikkei, Koreans, Indonesians. In some urban dioceses (Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Saitama), faithful of foreign origin represent more than 50% of Sunday Mass attendees; in Tokyo, Mass is regularly celebrated in Tagalog, Vietnamese, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

Fifteen Dioceses, Three Ecclesiastical Provinces

Since the canonical merger of Takamatsu into Osaka in 2023, Japan has 15 dioceses (not 16) divided into three ecclesiastical provinces:

Province of Tokyo (1 archdiocese + 5 dioceses): Archdiocese of Tokyo; Dioceses of Niigata, Saitama (formerly Urawa), Sapporo, Sendai, Yokohama.

Province of Osaka-Takamatsu (1 archdiocese + 3 dioceses): Archdiocese of Osaka-Takamatsu; Dioceses of Hiroshima, Kyoto, Nagoya.

Province of Nagasaki (1 archdiocese + 4 dioceses): Archdiocese of Nagasaki; Dioceses of Fukuoka, Kagoshima, Naha (Okinawa), Oita.

Universities, Hospitals, Caritas Japan

Sophia University (上智大学) in Tokyo, founded by the Jesuits in 1913, remains the major Catholic university in Japan: 9 faculties, ~13,900 students, alumni at the highest levels of Japanese society. Nanzan University (南山大学) in Nagoya, founded by the Verbites in 1932, hosts the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture—a world reference for Christian-Buddhist dialogue. Nagasaki Junshin University was established post-war as a training school for missionary religious sisters.

The hospital network includes Seibo Byōin (聖母病院, Hospital of the Holy Mother) in Tokyo, founded in 1931 by the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul; St. Mary’s Hospital in Kurume (Fukuoka); and diocesan networks in Nagasaki and Sapporo. Caritas Japan, the official agency of the CBCJ since 1959, distinguished itself notably during the Tōhoku tsunami (March 11, 2011) and the Fukushima nuclear accident: its teams coordinated worldwide Catholic aid and managed on-site shelter, meals, and psychological support for months.

Foreign Catholicism as a New Breath

The most recent face of the Japanese Church is its transnationalization. Japan, long resistant to immigration, has welcomed since the 1990s several hundred thousand foreign workers—among whom a considerable proportion are Catholics. Pastoral estimates suggest, as orders of magnitude (and not as official CBCJ statistics):

• ~ 300,000 Filipino residents, overwhelmingly Catholic
• ~ 400,000 Vietnamese residents, including a Catholic minority
• ~ 200,000 Japanese-Brazilian descendants, mostly Catholic
• tens of thousands of Koreans, Indonesians, and other residents, some of whom are Catholic

In total, foreign resident Catholics would number in the hundreds of thousands — perhaps almost as many as native Japanese Catholics. This reality compels parishes to become multilingual and intercultural; some, in the suburbs of Tokyo or Nagoya, now function more as Filipino or Vietnamese parishes than as traditional Japanese parishes.

Why Does Japan Resist the Gospel?

Sociologists and theologians have asked the same question for four centuries: why has Japan, despite the initial momentum (300,000 baptized in 1614), despite the heroic fidelity of the hidden Christians, despite the patient work of the 19th century and the holiness of Nagai, not crossed the threshold of 1% Catholics? Several hypotheses are proposed:

1. The deep attachment to Shinto-Buddhist identity as a structure of family and national belonging. A Japanese person remains a member of the buddha-dera (Buddhist temple where ancestors are buried) even if not a believer: Catholic conversion implies leaving the ancestral lineage in a ceremonial sense, which remains socially costly.
2. Endō’s “marsh” (沼 numa): according to the novelist of Silence, the Japanese spiritual soil has a unique ability to dissolve imported religions by draining their dogmatic edge. Christianity becomes sentimental, aesthetic, Marian—but loses its Christological center.
3. The national experience of Tokugawa persecution: for more than two centuries, the Japanese state learned to eradicate Christianity as a political threat. This collective memory has never been fully deconstructed; Christianity remains perceived as a foreign religion—bateren—even though Japan today has its own cardinals and national saints.
4. The mode of evangelization itself: too intellectual at Sophia, too Western in pre-conciliar liturgies, too discreetly Marian after Vatican II. Endō’s debate on “paternal” versus “maternal” Christianity remains an open core.

Endō’s “Marsh” and Catholic Mission Today

Added to this, for forty years, is the creeping secularization of Japan—funerary Buddhism emptied of spirituality, Shinto reduced to a state ritual, religious indifference affecting 70% of the population. But paradoxically, it is also this decline of traditional religions that has opened, since 2000, a new diffuse interest in Christian spirituality—often through literature (Silence, Nagai), pilgrimages to the “Hidden Christian Sites” of Kyūshū, medical investigations at Lourdes, and the Japanese fascination with the figure of the martyr, which resonates with that of the loyal samurai. The contemporary Japanese Church no longer bets so much on mass conversions as on the faithfulness of a creative minority.

Fruitfulness of the Blood Shed

What remains, as a backbone, is the blood of the martyrs. Tertullian’s phrase — “semen est sanguis christianorum”, the blood of Christians is seed^[56] — has perhaps nowhere in the world been so spectacularly verified as in Japan. Four hundred years after the Nishizaka burnings and the Unzen pits, four hundred years after the tortures of Urakami and the death of the 188 beatified, the Catholic Church in Japan still exists. Small, certainly; tested by the bomb; aging; but structured, articulated, endowed with contemporary saints awaiting canonization (Nagai and Midori), priests, universities, and a cardinal. It is very little and it is immense — in the spirit of what John Paul II said at Nishizaka in 1981, citing the parable of the grain of wheat (Jn 12:24): Christians died at Nagasaki, but the Church of Nagasaki did not die — rooted on the hill of the martyrs, it grew and flourished^[57].

Related Articles

• The Jesuit Missions in Japan (1549-1644) — detailed study of the golden age and the great Tokugawa persecution.
• The Chinese Rites Controversy — to understand the debate on Jesuit accommodation and its extension to Japanese Confucian rites.
• The Church in Contemporary China (1949-2026) — another martyred Church of the Far East.
• The Church in Vietnam — persecuted and faithful Asian Christianity, contemporary with Tokugawa Japan.
• The Church in Korea — another East Asian Christianity that endured a long persecution.
• Catholic Missions in Asia — synthesis of the great missionary movement in the Far East.

Main Sources

Primary Sources:

• Saint Francis Xavier, Letters and Instructions of Francis Xavier, ed. M. Joseph Costelloe, SJ, The Institute of Jesuit Sources, St. Louis, 1992 — comprehensive collection of Xavier’s letters in critical translation.
• Georg Schurhammer, SJ (ed.), Epistolae S. Francisci Xaverii aliaque eius scripta, 2 vols., Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, Rome, 1944-1945 — authoritative critical Latin edition.
• Luís Fróis, SJ (1532-1597), Historia de Japam, ed. José Wicki, SJ, 5 vols., Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, 1976-1984 — Portuguese chronicle by a direct witness of the 26 martyrs and Hideyoshi’s persecution.
• Pius XII / Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, Instructio Plane compertum est circa quasdam caeremonias super ritibus sinensibus, December 8, 1939 (AAS 32, 1940).
• Saint John Paul II, Appeal for Peace, Hiroshima, February 25, 1981 — official text Vatican.va and Insegnamenti di Giovanni Paolo II, vol. IV/1 (1981).
• Pope Francis, Speech at the Hypocenter Park, Nagasaki, November 24, 2019 — official text Vatican.va.
• Takashi Nagai, Nagasaki no Kane 長崎の鐘 (1949), French trans. The Bells of Nagasaki: Diary of an Atomic Bomb Victim, intro. Masao Tomonaga, Éditions de l'Emmanuel, 2019, ISBN 978-2-490-10534-2.
• Conference of Catholic Bishops of Japan (CBCJ), Catholic Church Statistics in Japan 2024 (2024 教会現勢), August 2025, cbcj.catholic.jp.

Academic Studies:

• Charles R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1951 (reprint Carcanet Press 1993, ISBN 978-1-857-54035-2) — authoritative historical study in English.
• George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan, Harvard University Press, 1973 (reprint 1988) — study of Tokugawa anti-Christian sources.
• Stephen Turnbull, The Kakure Kirishitan of Japan: A Study of Their Development, Beliefs and Rituals to the Present Day, Japan Library, Richmond, 1998.
• Mark R. Mullins, Christianity Made in Japan: A Study of Indigenous Movements, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1998.
• Paul Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki: The Story of Takashi Nagai, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2009, ISBN 978-1-586-17343-7 — definitive biography of Takashi Nagai.
• Maria Winowska, The Madman of Our Lady, Father Maximilian Kolbe, Saint-Paul Editions, Paris, 1949 — definitive biography for Kolbe’s Japanese mission.
• Antonio Ricciardi, OFM Conv., Blessed Maximilian Kolbe, Conventual Friars, Rome, 1971.