Why has Catholicism not been accepted and grown in Japan?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Krisdun
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
K

Krisdun

Guest
Despite the many priests and missions sent there over the years, the proportion of Catholics in Japan currently remains very low (under 0.5% of the population). Why is this so? For comparison there are around 5 million Catholics (over 10% of the population) in nearby South Korea.
 
Japan is, to put it simply, an ‘interesting’ society. It is very conservative, and very highly developed (even though these two things seem like an oxymoron; most highly developed countries are more liberal).

Most people are at least nominally Shinto (the traditional religion), although it is usually mixed in with Buddhism.

The country is highly resistant to change. It has adapted much of Western culture but not in the sphere of religion.

For the most part, they are very traditional and don’t want much change with regards to culture.
 
Last edited:
To be fair, there was a period in time where the Church of did grow in Japan quite fast, then was outlawed. I think after that point, people simply lost interest
 
Yes, but certainly not all of them. It’s been 75 years, in a society with a very low birthrate, yet neither reproduction nor conversion has substantially increased the Catholic population ratio in Japan. Furthermore, the atomic bombs, destructive as they were, were a small fraction of Japanese casualties in WWII.
 
.
I was in Japan two years ago visiting the martyrs’ shrines there. After Saint Francis Xavier came there in the 1500s there was a great wave of conversions in Japan. This then was viciously crushed by the government. Perhaps Japan would have become Catholic, or a good proportion of the people would have become Catholic.
Then finally Christianity became legal in Japan towards the end of the 19th century, the few Japanese Catholics who survived could come from hiding. Why were did so many become Catholic after Saint Francis Xavier came, and this is not happening now? I don’t know, and have wondered why myself.
 
Last edited:
Krisdun said:
Despite the many priests and missions sent there over the years, the proportion of Catholics in Japan currently remains very low (under 0.5% of the population). Why is this so? For comparison there are around 5 million Catholics (over 10% of the population) in nearby South Korea.
Click to expand...
The presence of a strong semi-indigenous religion that has a very strong cultural association with the Japanese personal ideal, particularly the male ideal.
 
Last edited:
Far different in Korea. Also in Taiwan. I watch programs about the tsunami on NHK, the Japanese TV network. They all have tremendous difficulty dealing with the tragedy, and seem lost in that they have no real outlet. It is indeed a nation of stark contrasts.
 
This same question could be asked of many places. Take India… yes there are millions of Catholics there… but as a percentage of the total population it is very small. Yet Christianity has been in India for 2000 years. Think about this… there were most likely Christians in India before there were Christians in what is now England.
 
Interesting point given Nagasaki did have a substantial number of Catholics living there before the atomic bomb was dropped on it and at various points in its history. Had Nagasaki not been hit or stayed largely intact it may have been an area where Catholicism was flourishing today. Also interesting to note that several well known saints were sent on missions to Nagasaki :- St Francis Xavier, St Paulo Miki and St Maximilian Kolbe
 
Last edited:
From the little I know, the Japanese imperial family is (were ? no idea what the official stance is since the 1946 decree where emperor Hirohito, under American pressure, said he was not an incarnated deity) said to be descendants of Shinto deities. Until last century, being a good citizen, loyal to the emperor, and being a Shinto believer were synonymous.

Even if Korea at first strongly resisted the introduction of Christianity, the religious landscape in Korea had always been less monolithic, and there had been a conflict for some time between Buddhism, which had relocated most of its shrines in the mountains for fear of persecution, and Confucianism, the state ideology of the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910).

Paging @Katsuobushi, who is probably far more knowledgeable about this.
 
Krisdun said:
Despite the many priests and missions sent there over the years, the proportion of Catholics in Japan currently remains very low (under 0.5% of the population). Why is this so? For comparison there are around 5 million Catholics (over 10% of the population) in nearby South Korea.
Click to expand...
May as well ask the same question .of almost.every country where Catholicism is not a significant religion - Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, India …

The common factors are very well-established alternative faiths and a limited European.or Western presence.or influence.
 
Last edited:
I chose a Japan because I know that there have been many attempts through missions to spread the gospel there. Other countries including several in Africa have been more receptive despite competition from other religions. Maybe it is a cultural thing? Also perhaps the same can be applied to the countries (e.g. Indonesia, Thailand) you mentioned although I am not sure what attempts have been made through missionary work in these territories?
 
Last edited:
If I had to guess, I would say that it’s a bad cultural fit.

Based on what I know about Japanese society (never been there), it is a culture which prizes conformity, “everyone doing the exact same thing”. Conversion to anything that isn’t in step with how the vast majority of people do things, wouldn’t be something that would ordinarily occur to a Japanese person. This said, miracles of grace do take place, and before the war, Nagasaki had a large Catholic population.

In all fairness, there are wide swaths of the United States that are essentially monocultures, and in the 1950s, conformity was the coin of the realm. This deeply influenced Catholics in this country — they wanted to be the same as the majority, not to be a ghettoized “culture within a culture” with strange beliefs and customs that weren’t shared by society at large.
 
The Japanese religious tradition is very eclectic and unlike the religions we’re familiar with in the West, the Japanese don’t regard different religions as mutually incompatible. So it’s not unusual to go into a Buddhist temple and see statues of Shinto deities on display there, and vice versa. My mother-in-law is a Japanese Christian, and even I was surprised that she had taken up the project of memorizing the Lotus Sutra, presumably as a spiritual exercise. So given this tradition of eclecticism, syncretism and unwillingness to reject all that came before in favor of a new religion, it’s very hard to imagine a religion like Christianity or Islam coming in and replacing all the other religions; the best you could hope for would be that it settles harmoniously into the pre-existing religious ecosystem.
 
Still today some people are uncomfortable being ‘openly’ Christian in Japan. I think partly to do with cultural aspects and partly to do with the history of Christianity in the country. When Christianity was banned, a lot of it slipped underground and to an extent, stays underground.

I think perhaps also in Japan Christianity has adapted into Japanese culture, rather than the other way around, so it co-exists with Shinto and Buddhism.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top