How Japan dealt with the Christian Threat

Sep 19

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A beautiful post about combatting monotheism. This is what happened in Japan when Christian missionaries tried to destroy their culture and religions. It’s a very good read.

vajrin

We have touched on the topic before (http://vajrin.wordpress.com/2013/03/02/japans-defeat-of-christianity-lessons-for-hindus/) & advise people to read that piece first before reading this one. We hope to briefly cover the actual measures that the Tokugawa Shogunate employed to suppress Christianity. The Japanese employed a range of measures for this because they correctly saw Christianity as a very serious threat intent on destroying their civilization. The following list covers each method only briefly and those interested may look up more information in the relevant books.

The below are the various methods that were utilized by the Japanese government to wipe out Christianity from Japan before the Christians could destroy Japan. Naturally some of this may seem cruel & Christian propagandists have tried their best to exaggerate their suffering & paint themselves as victims. But it must be remembered that the Christians were the aggressors who used forcible conversion (when a daimyo converted he imposed Christianity…

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About ganglerisgrove

Galina Krasskova has been a Heathen priest since 1995. She holds a Masters in Religious Studies (2009), a Masters in Medieval Studies (2019), has done extensive graduate work in Classics including teaching Latin, Roman History, and Greek and Roman Literature for the better part of a decade, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Theology. She is the managing editor of Walking the Worlds journal and has written over thirty books on Heathenry and Polytheism including "A Modern Guide to Heathenry" and "He is Frenzy: Collected Writings about Odin." In addition to her religious work, she is an accomplished artist who has shown all over the world and she currently runs a prayer card project available at wyrdcuriosities.etsy.com.

Posted on September 19, 2018, in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. 6 Comments.

  1. Ryan | September 20, 2018 at 10:47 AM

    More countries should learn from and emulate Japan’s response to Christianity. It is truly HIV of the soul and should be treated as such.

    Liked by 1 person

    • Melas the Hellene | September 20, 2018 at 7:19 PM

      Ah…but which countries? Christianity is pandemic and has already spread universally. I wish its virulence could have been stopped earlier, but it wasn’t, and now it has given rise to new derivative diseases like globalization, materialism and anti-tradition. The course to take today against these contradictory forces is a very difficult and somewhat contradictory one: a mixture of caution and resolution, isolation and activism, shrewdness and wisdom. Or we could do nothing and Christianity is declining and eating itself away, but we need to replace it slowly, surely and honestly, because there are others who are waiting for the prize.

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  2. crow | September 20, 2018 at 2:11 PM

    I actually had this exact discussion with someone IRL. It seems hypocritical in modern academia to frame this history as “the massacre of innocent Christians”, rather than “the defense by indigenous peoples against Colonialist invaders”.

    This is not excusing the violence and harm done to genuinely innocent individuals, or well-meaning religious practitioners persecuted unfairly. But the Christians at this time used specific and intentional tactics to maneuver themselves into power, including unscrupulous ones — and time has shown the devastating effects of colonialism, as well as biases caused by the lack of cultural relativism in our historical views.

    As for Polytheists, I have always felt recognizing the amount of force/coercion in the conversion to Christianity of one’s ancestors is an important piece of info to weigh.

    Liked by 4 people

  3. K | September 23, 2018 at 12:16 AM

    I think about it like this. If things had happened differently, we would hear of how the Catholic church started a Japanese branch of the Inquisition. We would hear about how every shrine and temple in Japan, down to the smallest hokora, was destroyed. They would have put a church down on every old sacred site. We would hear of the church at Mt. Miwa, built to convert the people that revered that site. And of course, many people would have been killed for not converting, for being declared heretics, and in the process of the Christian takeover. The worst case scenario, the Portuguese and Spanish would have used their foothold to make puppet rulers or just outright colonize Japan. No doubt they would have brought many foreign slaves, traders, and colonists there as well. The place probably would not look very much like Japan anymore in the worst case scenario, but like every other place today colonized by those countries.

    We would hear from Catholic scholars about how it was “regrettable” about all the suppression and violence against Japanese “religion” but it had the good aspect of bringing Japan into the fold. Don’t worry, Cardinal of Nagasaki Antonio Shouni and Bishop Jose Santa Maria Otomo of Kagoshima just endorsed setting up a historical museum for Japanese and Shinto related history. However, recent attempts by a small group of Shinto revivalists to set up a small shrine near Mt. Hiei have met with protesters that have threatened to “burn the devil shrine down.” No statement on that has been made yet by the Pope or Cardinal Miguel Takatsukasa of Cidade de Santa Francisco Xavier(formerly Kyoto). Imagine hearing of this sort of thing.

    Liked by 4 people