Religion: Persecution in Japan

Men and women were torn apart by oxen, broken on cart wheels, cut in pieces by hand saws, steamed to death in hot springs. Rich and poor, city folk and farmers—at least 40,000 of the Japanese Christian community of 200,000 souls—”suffered death calmly for the sake of their Christian faith, evincing no resentment against anyone but, on the contrary, offering prayers for the sake of their persecutors.” Such was the great Japanese martyrdom which took place 300 years ago when the Christian community founded there by St. Francis Xavier was suppressed. Christianity has not had a single martyr in Japan since Commodore Perry reopened it to missionaries and traders in 1853. Last week, as the Japanese Government’s undercover campaign to purge Christian missions of their foreign elements and reduce Christianity to the status of a minor sect within the Shinto nationalist cult progressed, there was further evidence that Japanese Christians today have no thirst for martyrdom.

Japan’s No. 1 Christian, Toyohiko Kagawa, was released from the prison to which he was hustled last month. Christian Kagawa said he would spend the rest of his life tending tuberculous Japanese on pine-studded, golden-beached Toyoshima, one of the “dream islands” of Japan’s Inland Sea. Louder than his words was the obvious inference that, at the behest of Japan’s New Order in East Asia, he had abandoned militant Christianity for politically innocuous social service.

Methodist Bishop Yoshimune Abe let his words speak louder than silence. Bishop Abe, reported Harold Edward Fey in last week’s Christian Century, regularly worships at the great imperial shrine of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu Omikami at Ise, the Mecca of Shintoism, declares that “every Japanese should go … for it is a holy place.” When Bishop Abe was raised to the episcopate last October, wrote Mr. Fey, “almost his first act was to visit a pagan shrine for worship.”

“When I stand in front of the shrine at Ise, I feel differently from the way I feel at any other place,” he reported Bishop Abe as saying. “I feel a great sense of peace, of inexpressible sacredness, of oneness with the Ancestor of my country [Amaterasu Omikami] and my own ancestors. I am moved with a feeling of holiness, of piety. My spirit worships, but this is not religion. It is respect, adoration.”

This Bishop Abe is slated to head the Genuine Japan Christian Church into which all Protestant sects in Japan are being merged. Having imposed native heads on the Protestant missions and pledged them to renounce foreign financial support, the Japanese Government moved on the Orthodox and Roman Catholic communions. The powers of Russian Archbishop Sergei, leader of the Orthodox followers of the Prince of Peace, were taken over by Heikichi Ichikawa, formerly an instructor in Tokyo’s military academy.

The foreign principals of six Roman Catholic schools—one Irish, one Italian and four French priests—were replaced by Japanese.

Roman Catholics, the victims 300 years ago of Japan’s great Christian martyrdom, were silent last week over the forced resig nation of the six. The Pope’s Apostolic Delegate to Japan did not publicly protest.

Since some 70% of the Catholic priests and officers of Japan are foreigners, the church is certain to undergo further restrictions. Catholics, like Protestants, meanwhile paid obeisance at Shinto shrines.

Japanese nationalists look on Christianity less as a religion than as part of the way of life of the U. S. and Britain. And the Japanese are suppressing Christianity with Oriental courtesy. Foreign financial aid, they hinted last week, need not be halted — if foreign mission boards will simply turn the money over to the Japanese for disposal.