Japan: How does a society that once performed miracles by moving forward together face the loneliness of each individual? Keys to the culture: 本音と建前 · 世間 · 迷惑 · 恥 · 無常. Geography and history, the church, films and books, and prayer for this land.
How does a society that once performed miracles by moving forward together face the loneliness of each individual?
Japan is an arc of islands in the western Pacific: the four main islands of Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu, together with Okinawa and more than 6,000 smaller islands. Its land area is about 380,000 square kilometers, yet it is home to roughly 120 million people—and more than 70 percent of the country is mountainous. Where do people live? Crowded into narrow coastal plains. This geographical fact unlocks much of what follows: the Tokyo region has gathered more than 30 million people into the world's largest metropolitan area, while villages in the mountains and on remote islands are quietly aging and disappearing.
The archipelago sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire. Earthquakes, typhoons, volcanoes, and tsunamis are not news vocabulary here but everyday words. The Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, known as “3.11,” was not an anomaly but a dramatic disclosure of what is normal for this land. Living with disaster has deeply shaped Japanese senses of order and impermanence; see “Keys to the Culture.”
The climatic span from north to south is startling. Hokkaido is subarctic, and Sapporo winters resemble those of Harbin; Okinawa is subtropical, warm enough for light clothing in January. On the Sea of Japan side, the “snow country” may receive several meters of winter snow, while the Pacific side has clear winters, humid summers, and a lingering rainy season. The seasons are distinct enough to become culture itself: cherry blossom, rainy season, autumn leaves, and first snow are nationwide events on the calendar. Blossoms last seven days. The brevity of beauty forms a foundation of Japanese aesthetics.
Jōmon pottery and Yayoi wet-rice farming are among the earliest stories of these islands. Rice, metal, and writing all crossed from the continent by way of the Korean Peninsula. Buddhism arrived in the sixth century. From the seventh through the ninth centuries, Japan repeatedly sent envoys to Sui and Tang China and learned on a broad scale: Chinese characters, legal and administrative codes, and capital-city planning. Nara's Heijō-kyō was laid out after the model of Chang'an. Readers familiar with East Asian history may recognize kinship here: the two peoples once worked from the same civilizational blueprint.
In the Heian period, Japan transformed what it had learned into something of its own. Kana emerged, and The Tale of Genji was written centuries before Europe's earliest novels. The warrior class then took the stage. Through the Kamakura, Muromachi, and Warring States periods, the sword and Zen traveled together for seven centuries. Catholicism arrived with Portuguese merchant ships in the mid-sixteenth century; that story continues in “The Church in This Land.” After the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu founded the Edo shogunate, which soon imposed national seclusion. For the next 250 years, Japan left only a small window at Nagasaki open to the outside, while within, high literacy, ukiyo-e, and urban merchant culture flourished amid relative peace.
American “Black Ships” forced the country open in 1853. The Meiji Restoration transformed a feudal polity into Asia's first modernized state at astonishing speed. Under the slogan “Japanese spirit, Western learning,” a generation built railways, a constitution, and universities. The Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 devastated Tokyo and Yokohama. A brief opening of “Taishō democracy” then faded, and the road turned dark in the early Shōwa era: Japan embraced militarism and waged wars of aggression that brought immense suffering to China and its Asian neighbors while dragging its own people into war. It ended in 1945 with defeat and the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Postwar Japan began again from the ruins. A new constitution established popular sovereignty and renounced war; women entered polling stations for the first time. An economic miracle followed. The Shinkansen opened in 1964, and the Tokyo Olympics announced Japan's return to the world. By 1968 its economy was the world's second largest. Then the bubble burst around 1990, beginning the “lost thirty years”: growth stalled, lifetime employment weakened, and young people's expectations for the future changed. Many works on this page belong on this timeline: the lonely deaths of Muen Shakai, the precarity of Shoplifters, and the enduring appeal of No Longer Human. The disaster of 3.11 shook the nation again in 2011. In 2019 the era name changed to Reiwa, the first taken from the Man'yōshū rather than a Chinese classic—a quiet but meaningful footnote. Japan today is one of the world's oldest societies: nearly three in ten people are over 65, and the population declines year after year. History leaves this question for the present: how does a society that once performed miracles by moving forward together face the loneliness of each individual?
In 1549 the Jesuit Francis Xavier landed in Kagoshima and first brought the gospel to Japan. The first fifty years went unexpectedly well. Daimyō converted, becoming known as Christian lords; believers at one point numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and Nagasaki became almost a Catholic city.
The reversal was brutal. In 1597 Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered twenty-six believers executed at Nishizaka in Nagasaki after they had been marched there from Kyoto. The youngest, Luis Ibaraki, was only twelve. They are remembered as the Twenty-Six Martyrs. In 1614 the Tokugawa shogunate issued a nationwide ban on Christianity, followed by more than two centuries of suppression. Believers were required to trample images of Christ, known as fumie, to prove that they did not believe. Shūsaku Endō's Silence inhabits this world.
Then came one of the rarest episodes in church history. Deprived of every priest and without Bibles, believers went underground. In fishing villages and on remote islands of Kyushu, oral Scriptures and prayers quietly transmitted the faith across seven generations and 250 years. They became known as the Hidden Christians. After Nagasaki reopened, a French priest built Ōura Church in 1865. A group of villagers from Urakami entered and quietly spoke the famous words: “Our hearts are the same as yours.” This “discovery of the Christians” astonished the Catholic world. Persecution did not end immediately. In the subsequent Fourth Urakami Persecution, more than three thousand people were exiled. Only in 1873, under Western pressure, did the Meiji government remove the public notices banning Christianity.
Protestantism entered after the opening of the country and produced an unusual generation of intellectuals, including Uchimura Kanzō, Nitobe Inazō, and Uemura Masahisa. In 1891 Uchimura lost his teaching post after refusing to bow deeply to the Imperial Rescript on Education in the “Lèse-majesty Incident.” He later founded the Nonchurch movement, asking whether Japanese people could follow Christ directly without a Western shell. This marked a beginning for indigenous Japanese theology; see “Their Voices.”
On August 9, 1945, an atomic bomb exploded over Urakami in Nagasaki, the community with Japan's greatest concentration of Catholics. About eight thousand believers died and Urakami Cathedral was destroyed. Physician Nagai Takashi wrote The Bells of Nagasaki amid the ruins. This is one of history's places where the weight is beyond speech.
After the war, faith became completely free, yet Christians have remained around one percent of the population. This is not simply because the gospel has never been heard. Seken, the social world described in “Keys to the Culture,” makes one person's conversion an event involving an entire web of relationships. Churches in Japan today are older on average, aging with the society around them, but Christian schools, hospitals, and social ministries have influence far beyond their numbers. Pray for the church in this land for the sake of those who have been faithful all their lives within that one percent, rather than for a mission score.