For 250 Years Japanese Christians Hid Their Faith Inside Buddhist Statues

When the Tokugawa shogunate banned Christianity in 1614, the Japanese Catholic church had perhaps 300,000 baptised members concentrated around Nagasaki and the islands of western Kyushu. Foreign missionaries were expelled or executed; suspected believers were forced to step on a fumie, a brass plaque depicting Christ or the Virgin, to prove they were not Christian. Refusing meant death — by crucifixion, by being suspended head-down over a pit, by being held under boiling sulphur springs at Unzen.

Many apostatized publicly. A subset went underground. They became the Kakure Kirishitan — "the hidden Christians" — and for the next two and a half centuries they kept the faith inside their families with no priests, no public liturgy, and no contact with Rome. They could not own crucifixes; they could not gather at a chapel. So they hid the religion inside the architecture of Buddhism. Statues of the bodhisattva Kannon, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, were carved holding a child in a way that to a passing inspector looked like ordinary Buddhist iconography. Inside the household, the same image was venerated as the Madonna and child. These figures are still called Maria Kannon. Latin prayers were memorized and passed down phonetically through generations of believers who no longer spoke Latin.

On 17 March 1865, a few months after a French priest named Bernard Petitjean opened a small church for foreign residents in Nagasaki, a group of villagers from Urakami appeared at the door and asked, in carefully chosen Japanese, where the statue of Santa Maria was kept. They told Petitjean they had been waiting for the priests to return for two hundred and fifty years. Pope Pius IX, when the news reached Rome, called it the Miracle of the Orient.

The twelve sites where the Kakure Kirishitan kept their faith were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage property in 2018.