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Christianity was introduced to Japan in the
sixteenth century by Portuguese and Spanish Roman Catholic missionaries,
but, because it was associated with Western imperialism and considered a
threat to Japanese political control, it was banned from the mid-seventeenth
century to the mid-nineteenth century. With the reopening of Japan in the
mid-1850s, missionaries again arrived. While fewer than 1 million people
(less than 1 percent of the population) consider themselves Christian in the
early 1990s, Christianity is respected for its contributions to society,
particularly in education and social action. There are more than 7,600
places of Christian worship in Japan. In the late 1980s, about 64 percent of
all Christians belonged to Protestant churches, about 32 percent to the
Roman Catholic Church, and about 4 percent to other Christian denominations.
Christianity is usually linked with Shinto and
Buddhism as one of the three traditional religions of Japan, though it
is considered a foreign religion in a way Buddhism is not. First introduced
by the famous Jesuit missionary, Saint Francis Xavier, in 1549, it spread
more rapidly in Japan during the next several decades than in any other
non-Western country. Christians came to number close to half a million, a
much larger percentage of the population of that time than there are today.
But Hideyoshi and the early Tokugawa shoguns came to view Christianity as
a threat to political unity and suppressed it ruthlessly, creating in
the process a large number of Japanese martyrs and virtually stamping out
religion by 1638. The nineteenth century Japanese remained deeply
hostile to Christianity, abut they soon learned the strength of the
Western feelings about the religion and therefore tactically dropped their
prohibition of it in 1873 and then made explicit a policy of complete
religious tolerance. But Christianity this time spread much more slowly.
Even today its participants number only a mere three quarters of a
million--less than one percent of the population--divided fairly evenly by
Protestants and Catholics.
After the Meiji Restoration, Protestant
Christianity, largely brought by American missionaries, was taken up by a
number of able young samurai, particularly those from the losing side of
the civil war, who sought in Christianity a new ethics and philosophy of
life to take the place of discredited Confucianism. These men injected a
strong sense of independence into the native church. In fact, under the
leadership of Uchimara Kanzo, a leading intellectual of the time, a No
Church movement was founded in reaction against the sectarian divisions of
Protestantism in the West. During World War II the government, for
control purposes, forced the various Protestant sects into a United Church
of Christ in Japan.
The
influence of Christianity on modern Japanese society is far greater than its
numbers of adherents would suggest. Christians, though small in numbers,
are strongly represented among the best educated, leading elements and have
therefore have shown a quite disproportionate influence. Another factor is
that Christianity, as an important element of Western civilization, has
attracted general interest and curiosity. Most educated Japanese probably
have a clearer concept of the history and of Christianity than they do
Buddhism.
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