Christmas is for the Japanese, rather miserably, a regular working day. This might easily not have been the case. The Japanese were once on the verge of adopting the Christian faith at every strata of society, from peasant to ruler. The English Reformation had a surprisingly significant role in ensuring this didn’t come to pass.
By the eighteenth century, organised Christianity had disappeared from public life
When St Francis Xavier arrived in Japan in 1549, Christianity was entirely unknown there. Within half a century, it had become the fastest-growing religion in the country’s history. By the early seventeenth century, contemporary missionary estimates placed the number of Japanese converts at over one million, from a total population of roughly twelve million. From small beginnings, several powerful daimyō eventually converted, as did samurai. Churches, schools, and seminaries were established. Catechisms and devotional texts were printed in Japanese. By 1613, Jesuits had even translated large extracts from the New Testament and circulated these in Kyoto.
This expansion coincided with Japan’s transition from a period of civil war to one of political consolidation. By the late sixteenth century, Tokugawa Ieyasu was emerging as the dominant power. He was pragmatic, cautious, and intensely concerned with maintaining sovereignty. Foreign influence was tolerated so long as it appeared manageable.
It was at this moment that William Adams arrived. Adams, born in Gillingham in Kent and trained as a pilot in Elizabethan England, reached Japan in 1600 after his Dutch ship was wrecked. He was a member of the Church of England and a product of a society in which anti-Catholicism was institutional rather than merely theological.
Jesuit priests in England were framed as agents of foreign powers; English law treated them as traitors, and official sermons frequently portrayed Catholic missions abroad as preludes to political domination (despite the fact the agents of such had their ascetic lifestyles and martyrdoms to prove genuine evangelistic conviction). Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which Elizabeth ordered to be kept in churches across the nation, was a useful propaganda tool and presented persecution and villainy in English history as one-sidedly Catholic.
Raised in a milieu coloured by such religious strife and messaging, and having fought the Spanish Armada, Adams carried an exemplary personal hostility towards Catholics.
Upon his arrival in Japan, authorities interrogated Adams extensively. Jesuit records and Japanese sources note that he was questioned not only about his navigation and trade, but about European religion and politics. Adams explained the division between Catholics and Protestants and described the newfound rivalry between England, Spain, and Portugal. Crucially, he characterised Japan’s burgeoning Catholic population as a source of sedition.
Adams later entered Tokugawa Ieyasu’s service, receiving samurai status, land, and a role as an adviser on foreign affairs. In this capacity, he was determined to prevent the rival Catholic Portuguese from establishing further outposts of influence and wielded his sway over the shogun to exacerbate suspicions of his Catholic subjects. Drip feeding anti-Jesuit conspiracies into the ruler’s ear, Adams’ cause and position was strengthened after violent incidents involving a Portuguese vessel and later Christian daimyō. Ieyasu soon replaced Jesuit priest João Rodrigues Tçuzu with Adams as court translator.
Japanese suspicion of Christianity predated Adams’ arrival. A notably insular culture, the arriving European Catholic missionaries were met with racially- and religiously-motivated resistance simultaneously to eager converts in strong measure. In 1587, Toyotomi Hidetoshi had issued an edict ordering missionaries to leave, though enforcement was inconsistent. Concerns included the destruction of Buddhist institutions by some daimyō converts, the visible allegiance of converts to a foreign religion above all, and reports (not always accurate, some of these alleged habitual cannibalism) of Spanish colonial practices abroad. In this context, Adams’ agitation against the swelling Catholic presence in Japan gained sympathy.
In 1614, Tokugawa Ieyasu issued a nationwide prohibition of Christianity. Missionaries were expelled, churches destroyed, and all Japanese Christians ordered to renounce their faith. Under his successors, repression intensified. The state introduced systematic methods of identification, including the fumi-e, requiring Christians to trample on images of Christ or the Virgin Mary. Refusal led to imprisonment, innovatively cruel methods of torture, then execution. Some were boiled alive.
Tens of thousands were massacred in the following decades. The Shimabara Rebellion of 1637-38, involving many impoverished Christian peasants, reinforced the shogunate’s conviction that Christianity posed a threat to social order. Japan thereafter closed itself entirely to European contact, permitting limited trade only with the Dutch – who were, notably, Protestants with no intention of engaging in missionary work.
By the eighteenth century, organised Christianity had disappeared from public life. What remained were the Kakure Kirishitan – hidden Christian communities who preserved a fragmented, underground Catholic religion in secrecy for over two centuries of vicious persecution, without priests or sacraments besides baptism. When missionaries returned after the capital punishment for Christianity was lifted in the nineteenth century, they found these communities (a remnant of an estimated 20,000 members) still baptising and praying, often in corrupted Latin preserved by memory alone.
Though it was largely expunged, remnants of this remarkable Christian legacy survive in Japan
While the decision to root Christianity out of Japan was influenced by a number of factors – xenophobia, political concerns about domestic control and foreign influence, occasions of violence by zealous converts – the role of Adams’ inherited anti-Catholicism should not be under-estimated.
Having developed a friendship with Ieyasu, his position as an non-Catholic European unconnected to Portuguese trade or military networks meant his testimony carried substantial weight – to the point that a plethora of contemporaneous sources from Christians in Japan, such as Diogo de Carvalho’s letter to Pope Paul V, complained of Adams’ presence and foreboded what his counsel could produce.
Japan’s trajectory towards conversion was an accelerating trend of remarkable vitality. One can already observe by 1614 a flowering and distinct Catholic culture, with unique art and architecture. Though it was largely expunged, remnants of this legacy survive. Images such as the hanging scroll of Our Lady of Snows, painted in 1600 in Nagasaki, display a stunning fusion between the style of the ancient eastern Christian icons with traditional Japanese painting taking place – a relic of what could have been.
The vision of a Christian Japan was only curtailed by the deliberate, repressive intervention of the state: a state ruled by one whose ear was advised by a figure steeped in the religious prejudices of the Church of England establishment.
History, as life, is full of what ifs? Perhaps it’s no use crying over spilt milk. But perhaps too the Japanese might this year celebrate Christmas by attending Mass and with a day off work – in symphony with the rest of the Christian world – had only an Anglican not been a catalyst to persecution. The English schism with Rome may have inadvertently prevented millions of souls, and an eastern superpower, from joining the Christian world.
