Is Christianity Doomed to Fail in Japan?

There are places in the world where there are hardly any Christians because of persecution or ideological oppression or because it’s outlawed. And then, well then there’s Japan. People aren’t forbidden from learning about Jesus. Christianity, it’s not illegal. And Japan has had religious freedom for at least the last 150 years, but there’s still hardly any Christians. And I want to know why. I want to know why most people in Japan will likely never meet a Christian. Yeah, there’s some stuff online in Japanese, but why will the majority possibly never actually meet a Christian or a church before they die? Why are there hardly any Christians in Japan?

Why are there hardly any Christians in Japan?

Okay, one quick fourteen-hour flight later, and we’re here. I’m heading now to the busiest pedestrian intersection in the world. 3000 people can cross it at once, and you’ve probably seen it in movies. It’s called Shibuya Crossing. This is right in the heart of Tokyo, which has more than 37 million people in the metro area making it the most populous city in the world. And Tokyo is known for a lot of other things too. History, art, beauty, culture, technology, sushi, anime. But one thing Tokyo is not known for is churches. In fact, the most populous city in the world is in a country considered one of the most unreached by the gospel. Japan is a nation of 125 million people, but less than 2% identified as Christian. And being part of that 2% isn’t easy. There’s a well-known Japanese proverb that says the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

Japanese culture values conformity. You don’t just abandon your beliefs for something new. And for the few believers who do, life can be difficult. But here’s the thing, it wasn’t always this way. In fact, when one of the first missionaries landed in Japan nearly five centuries ago, he called Japan, the country in the Orient most suited to Christianity. At first, seemed like he was right. In one generation, as many as 300,000 Japanese people claimed Christianity. So what happened? How did such a huge spark get almost completely snuffed out? And what happened to the few Christians who remained? Okay to understand better how Christianity once flourished in Japan, we’re actually going to have to leave Tokyo and fly 600 miles west to a much smaller coastal city whose name you’ll probably recognize, Nagasaki. 

Ground Zero

This is the spot where an atomic bomb detonated over Nagasaki on August 9th, 1945. That morning at 11:02 A.M. a blinding light flashed and tens of thousands of people died. It was actually the second atomic bomb the US dropped over Japan within three days to end World War II.

To this day, it’s the only time nuclear weapons have been used in combat. But I want to talk about something else that took place here. Nagasaki isn’t just ground zero for the atomic bomb. We’re also standing near ground zero for the persecution of Christians in Japan. Nearly 400 years before World War II, the first Catholic missionary landed south of these shores. As Japan began opening up for trade with other countries. Japan was known as the end of the Silk Road, and some considered it the end of the earth, sort of a fitting name for a spot where missionaries soon arrived. It didn’t take long for Spanish missionary, Francis Javier, to report that things were going well. Japanese people were embracing Christianity. Some people’s understanding and practice ran deeper than others, but the Christian faith even spread hundreds of miles away to Kyoto, the capital of Japan at the time. But trouble was on the horizon. Eventually, Japanese rulers grew suspicious of outside influence. They told missionaries to leave the country and they showed what could happen to Japanese Christians who didn’t leave the faith. 

Martyrs Hill

This is Martyrs Hill. This monument honors 26 Christians publicly executed here in 1597. Just about 15 years after the gospel landed on these shores. Authorities arrested and marched 20 Japanese Christians and six foreign missionaries hundreds of miles from Kyoto until they arrived here where 26 crosses were already waiting for them. One account tells us of a Christian boy who upon arriving, told his captors, show me my cross. And this was only the beginning. In 1614, an official edict banned Christianity in Japan and authorities enforced it on pain of death. They even devised a way to publicly test villagers loyalty here in Nagasaki, demanding every person step on an image of Christ to reject any claim to him. These images are called fumi-e, and they were basically a bronze image of Jesus or Mary mounted on a wooden frame. Stepping on one was a symbolic act. It became a way to force Christians to publicly renounce Christ.

Some wouldn’t do it and faced hellish torture. They were slowly drowned. They were burned. They were hung upside down over pits of corpses. And if they still didn’t relent, they were killed. Eventually, some did relent. Actually many did. So many trampled on the image that the fumi-e started to become smooth. There’s a movie from director Martin Scorsese about this time in history called Silence. It’s really worth watching. This ushered Japan into a 200-year period of isolation from the outside world. Any remaining Christians went into hiding. They became known as Kakure Kirishitan or Hidden Christians. In 1873, the Japanese government lifted the ban against Christianity. Missionaries returned, and Japanese who still claimed Christianity began emerging from hiding.

Many returned to the Catholic Church and some eventually built a cathedral near the site where so many were once persecuted. Things seemed stable enough for Christians in Nagasaki until decades later when an atomic bomb detonated within a few hundred meters of the cathedral burying everyone inside. You can still see the facade. This event was catastrophic for Japan and for Japanese Christians. Can you imagine being persecuted mercilessly for so long then finally attaining religious freedom, seeing some progress, only to then experience one of the most destructive events in human history. And to think that this kind of destruction happened twice.

A Message of Peace

Similar to Nagasaki, there’s a lot of parks and memorials in museums dedicated to remembering the destruction that happened here in 1945. I’m standing in front of one of the only buildings still remaining from the blast. It’s crazy to think that at one point, the entire city looked like this. An estimated 80,000 people died in the initial blast and tens of thousands died later from radiation exposure. This is Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. And if the people of Hiroshima stand for anything, it’s peace. It kind of sounds like the message for a church here too.

Yumi: So growing up in Japan, I think I was raised in a typical Japanese family. They practiced Buddhism teaching, but I’m not sure how much my family actually believed in it, but I never knew about Jesus. I heard about it I guess in school from textbook, but not, nothing about church or Jesus or the Bible.

This is Yumi. As is the case for most Japanese Christians, she was the first in her family to become a believer. Christianity and its teachings are so foreign to Japanese traditional belief, that it’s fair to say that Yumi and her husband Michael feel like they’ve lost their home and are living in a different world.

Michael: And so the main idea here is that it’s not that most people have heard the gospel and rejected it. The main idea is that they haven’t heard the gospel even once.

Yumi: I always believed there is a God since I was a small girl, but I didn’t necessarily believe that the god of Buddhism is the God or is the only God. I just always wondered who is this God that I think he exists, but just didn’t know.

Coming to Christ can be a tough experience in Japan. Leaving your family’s religion can be like leaving your family. And although Yumi had such a small chance of hearing the gospel in her home country, God opened up an opportunity when she studied abroad in the United States.

Yumi: I went to the church because I wanted to make friends. I just wanted to do something and I just wanted to be connected to a community. So I started meeting with Christians and I realized that I always felt that something missing in my heart, and I felt like those people had that thing that I don’t have, I’m missing. And I started comparing like, how can I be like them? What is the thing that they have that I don’t have? And I figured out that’s Jesus.

God was at work in Yumi’s heart to bring her into a community of loving brothers and sisters, and to reveal to her the nature of the true creator, God. At the same time, he was also calling Michael to share the gospel in Japan.

Michael: In 2011, huge earthquake in Northeast Japan, in the Sendai region and the Tohoku region. And there’s a whole testimony there, but God allowed me to leave Georgia for the first time and get on an airplane and go to Northeast Japan and volunteer there to do disaster relief. And through that, met so many Japanese people who had just recently lost their whole families and had lost their whole livelihoods. And at that time, I didn’t know any Japanese or couldn’t speak Japanese fluently or anything, but I knew I wanted to share the gospel with them. And I knew I wanted God to allow me to live in Japan and to share the gospel with as many people as I possibly could.

Yumi: I was learning about the Bible. I was attending church and my Bible study leader was there too. And she spoke to my friend who is from India. And my Bible study leader told her that the reason why you are loved, it’s not because of what you do, but because of who you are. You are so loved. No matter what you do, God loves you. That moment was when I knew that, oh, if this God loves a girl from India, he must love a girl from Japan too. So I guess in my mind, because I came to know Jesus in a foreign country in the States, I somehow thought this God is a foreign God.

Michael: The idea that anyone could become a Christian, that it’s not defined by your location or your culture or your language is pretty mind-blowing to the typical Japanese person, who thinks that, oh, we Japanese are Shinto and Buddhist, you Westerners are Christian, that’s great, but we Japanese are not, right? And so they define their religion by their nationality.

Yumi: The last people group I wanted to reach out to was Japanese. I didn’t want to be with Japanese because I knew how difficult for me to speak to them about spiritual thing, religion, about faith in Japanese, in a Japanese context. And I was so comfortable living in the States. That’s why I thought, I will just live in the States the rest of my life and find somebody and get married and live there happily ever after. That was my American dream. Until when God took me to this conference and somebody shared a scripture. It was Esther 4:12-14. It says, do not think you’re alone in the king’s palace. You’ll be saved a deliverance and assurance might come alive from another place, but you and your father’s house will be punished. Who knows but you have come to this place for such a time as this.

And when I heard it, I just knew that my palace is the United States. I had everything I wanted that’s very comfortable for me. My church, my friends, my school to go. And also I knew that God is the one who took me to the place so that I can learn about him. And God is a sovereign God who can bring deliverance and assurance from another place without my help to my people in Japan, to my Japanese people. But there might be some people like my father’s family, my family, my own family who might perish without knowing Christ. So I was very challenged. Yeah, I cannot be silent now.

Michael: Living here in Japan, I realized that, yeah, most of these friends had never even heard of a Creator God. Yes, generally people in Japan feel closed off to the gospel.

Yumi: Yes, Japan is such a hard ground. Somebody said Japan is a graveyard of the missionaries. That might be true.

Michael: 1 Corinthians 15:58, just memorize that verse and just remember that God, in him, in Christ, our labor is never in vain, and we should always abound in the work of the Lord. It’s a beautiful work here.

Yumi: Because it’s hard, I want to encourage people to come to see how God is stronger and God is better and God can do anything that we think it’s possible in a hard land. That’s where you can taste the goodness of God.