In Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel Silence, the apostatised priest Cristóvão Ferreira tells a Portuguese compatriot a bitter truth about Japanese Christianity. “The Japanese till this day have never had the concept of God,” he proclaims, “and they never will.” For a book set in the 17th century, it’s a fair point. Wary of colonisation by Western powers, the ruling shogunate banned Christianity in 1614, a policy aimed at isolating Japan from the rest of the world. As for those Japanese Catholics who remained, many were tortured and killed, with some crucified in an ironic play on the fate of their saviour.
In a sense, Ferreira’s argument remains true today. Barely 1% of Japanese people now identify as Christian, and if you asked the average Tokyo commuter to explain the Eucharist, they’d likely just stare. Yet if Japan is unique among the East Asian countries for remaining almost devoid of Christians, this is also a society where people wear their faith lightly, and where Buddhism and Shintoism have coexisted for centuries. That surely explains why modern Japanese now wallow in the symbols and traditions of Christmas, even as they twist outside customs to their needs. No less striking, those few Japanese who do embrace Jesus tend to do remarkably well — hinting at its long associations with Western sophistication.
