Japan's Hidden Christians fight to preserve their unique religion as it nears extinction

South China Morning Post

13-06-2025

On a small island in rural Nagasaki, Japan's Hidden Christians gather to worship what they call the Closet God.
In a special room about the size of a tatami mat is a scroll painting of a kimono-clad Asian woman. She looks like a Buddhist Bodhisattva holding a baby, but for the faithful, this is a concealed version of Mary and the baby Jesus.
Another scroll shows a man wearing a kimono covered with camellias, an allusion to John the Baptist's beheading and martyrdom.
There are other objects of worship from the days when Japan's Christians had to hide from vicious persecution, including a ceramic bottle of holy water from Nakaenoshima, an island where Hidden Christians were martyred in the 1620s.
A scroll depicting a kimono-clad Mary holding baby Jesus at a home on Ikitsuki Island. Photo: AP
Little about the icons in the tiny, easy-to-miss room on Ikitsuki Island can be linked directly to Christianity – and that is the point.
After emerging from cloistered isolation in 1865, following more than 200 years of violent harassment by Japan's insular warlord rulers, many of the formerly underground Christians converted to mainstream Catholicism.