Abstract
Despite its relatively long history of exposure to Christian mission, dating back over 460 years to St Francis Xavier’s arrival in Kagoshima in 1549—albeit with a major and traumatic interruption in the persecution and prohibition of Christianity from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century—Japan has shown numerically meagre results in terms of church membership. The most generous estimates of Christian affiliation put the total at less than three million, i.e. a little over 2% of a population of 130 million. This remarkably low figure—all the more striking when set beside the burgeoning of Christian life in neighbouring Korea and China—has prompted many reflections on the relationship between the Christian faith and Japanese culture, many of them highlighting what are seen as uniquely problematic features of the latter which render it peculiarly resistant to the Gospel message.
In a sense, Atsuyoshi Fujiwara’s monograph, which is based on his PhD thesis for Durham (many sections have already been published in various articles elsewhere), is another treatise in that tradition. Indeed, early in his introduction Fujiwara describes the culture of Japan as being ‘well-known as a desolate swamp for Christian missions’. The image dates back to Shusaku Endo, whose celebrated novel Silence notoriously described Japan as ‘a more terrible swamp than you can imagine. Whenever you plant a sapling in this swamp the roots begin to rot; the leaves grow yellow and wither. And we have planted the sapling of Christianity in this swamp.’ However, Fujiwara does not acknowledge Endo as the source of his imagery, and in fact Japan’s most celebrated Christian writer is only mentioned in passing in a hostile footnote. This reflects the focus of this monograph’s attention, which is not in fact Japanese culture as such, but rather those forms and patterns of Christian life which in Fujiwara’s view are able to express authentic and faithful Christian living in the Japanese cultural context.
This ecclesiological emphasis perhaps underlies what many might regard as a surprising lacuna in a treatment of the ‘theology of culture in a Japanese context’, namely, the absence of any sustained engagement with the historical and contemporary forms of non-Christian Japanese religion. There is only limited reference in each of Fujiwara’s three historical chapters to other Japanese religions: in the sixteenth century, to the Buddhist lexical background of Xavier’s attempts to forge a vocabulary for the Christian doctrine of God; in the mid-nineteenth century Meiji restoration, to the government’s measures to ‘purify’ Shinto from Buddhist influences and so create an ideology of the imperial cult to which people of all faiths, including Christians, should subscribe; in the post-World War II period, a brief account of Yasuo Furuya’s ‘theology of religions’ as part of a discussion of the latter’s theological method. However, it is striking that the (admittedly rather inadequate) index does not include ‘Buddhism’ among its entries, and the only listing for Shinto is, tellingly, ‘State Shinto’.
The ecclesiology on which Fujiwara uncompromisingly relies is what he refers to as ‘a believers’ church perspective’. Drawing on the Radical Reformation’s understanding of the true church as the congregatio credentium, Fujiwara develops this approach in the first two chapters of his book through engaging with the theologies of H. Richard Niebuhr and then of John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas. His espousal of this model is emphatic, exclusive, fundamental for his analysis of Japanese church history, and expressed repeatedly throughout the monograph, along with corresponding criticisms of other approaches, variously disparaged by epithets such as ‘imperial’, ‘magisterial’, ‘State Church’ and ‘Constantinian’.
For somebody like the present (Anglican) reviewer who does not subscribe to a believers’ church ecclesiology (incidentally, Fujiwara wryly and rather disarmingly notes that part of his Durham dissertation was written in Bishop Cosin’s Library, ‘a seventeenth-century edifice that epitomises the State Church heritage’), this raises at least two problems. First, while I respect, indeed admire, the conviction with which Fujiwara presents his ecclesiology, his many statements of the believers’ church model can feel like mere assertion, unsupported by adequate argumentation to establish his case that this is indeed the only pattern of church which enables authentic corporate discipleship. In fact, his adherence to this key aspect of his theology is largely reliant on exposition of Yoder’s and Hauerwas’s approaches; while Fujiwara does offer some modifications of both authors, his treatment of them is largely expository, assuming that readers will see the evident rightness of the ‘believers’ church’ ecclesiology if it is adequately explained. Yet the case does not seem to me at least to be obvious as it does to Fujiwara; I see the congregatio credentium model as one among several ecclesiologies, none of which can entirely capture the reality of the church. It is moreover noteworthy that Fujiwara’s biblical starting point invariably seems to be simply the New Testament gathering of the saints, without much reference to the People of God in the Hebrew Scriptures.
Secondly, alongside these weaknesses of theological method, when we turn to the historical reality of the church, it is clear that the ‘believers’ church model’ has not been that most commonly found. In fact, in one revealing passage Fujiwara acknowledges that many Japanese Christians consider that it is inappropriate in their context: In Japan, we often hear the argument (against Yoder’s understanding) that while a committed believers’ church model may have value as an antithesis or as a creative minority in Christian-based Western societies—in countries like Japan, where Christianity has always been in a minority, the believers’ church model does not apply because the church is simply ignored by society. (p. 98)
Fujiwara rather brushes this point aside with a further appeal to Yoder, but in fact the argument seems to me to have considerable force. Moreover, one consequence of the mismatch between Fujiwara’s favoured ecclesiology and historical actuality is that he ascribes the failure of Christian mission to transform Japanese society to a failure on the part of the church to live up to its true vocation, and this in terms starkly judgemental of the Japanese faithful. Of the years 1859–1945, for example, he writes that: ‘Christianity in this period failed to penetrate the soul of the Japanese Christian’ (p. 209); on the years 1945–1985, the assessment is only very slightly more lenient: ‘It is doubtful if the Christian message penetrated the souls of Christians in this period’ (p. 274). These are harsh words, and may be read as another attempt to solve the perceived problem of the ‘failure’ of Japanese missiology along the lines of Endo’s swamp theory; but this time the swamp is found in the Christian soul, not in the national culture.
When he comes to apply his theological method to the history of Japanese Christianity, Fujiwara identifies three successive phases: respectively, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the years 1859 to 1945; and the period 1945 to 1985. There are natural divisions between these three chapters: in between the first two intervened the more than two centuries during which Christianity was forbidden, the church driven underground, and the country of Japan deliberately kept in isolation from the rest of the world; at the end of the second period came the calamitous conflagration of the Second World War, to which a religiously inspired or sanctioned militaristic nationalism had contributed so much destructive force. It is not very common for surveys of Japanese Christianity to deal with both the earlier and the later periods in one sustained treatment, and it is particularly remarkable that Fujiwara, as a radically Reformed Christian, should devote so much attention to the early period of Roman Catholic mission and church life. This is a very welcome feature in an area of scholarship which has often been clearly demarcated between ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ writers and areas of study. At the same time, it is worth noting that in the later periods, Fujiwara focuses almost exclusively on Protestant Christianity; it would not be easy, reading this book, to realise that Japanese Catholic life started again in the mid-nineteenth century.
In many ways, perhaps precisely because of the freshness of vision that his cross-denominational perspective brings to the task, the first of Fujiwara’s historical chapters seems to me the most rewarding of the three. On the one hand, he is naturally hesitant about the ecclesiology lying behind the transmission of Catholic Christianity to Japan, representing as it does a ‘magisterial’, even a ‘Constantinian’ ecclesiology—though it is significant to note that at the end of the sixteenth century the missions in Japan constituted, from a European point of view, the largest community of overseas Christians not under the control of a colonial power, and, under the innovative leadership of Jesuits such as Alessandro Valignano, they were remarkable for the speed with which they developed indigenous leadership and inculturated expressions of faith. On the other hand, Fujiwara is very impressed by the high value placed on suffering in early Japanese Christianity as an expression of witness faithful to death; indeed, he contrasts this attitude, evident from the heroic stance of St Francis Xavier onwards, with the less impressive example of more recent Japanese church life, in which he claims that there is ‘an effort to avoid facing Christian suffering altogether’ (p. 184).
In a particularly interesting discussion in this chapter, Fujiwara draws attention to the parallels between a believers’ church ecclesiology and the establishment among early Japanese Christians of the confrarias, lay-organised brotherhoods of the faithful. There is certainly a spiritual development to be traced in the history of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Japanese confraria: beginning as a misericordia, a mutual aid society supporting widows and orphans, the sick and other indigent people, it soon acquired a strengthened devotional and educational role which enabled it to provide a skeletal structure for the underground churches which Christians formed in the period of persecution, when the confraria seems in some cases to have been transformed into a secretively catechetical community. Yet the confraria needs to be appraised not only theologically, as a possible Catholic equivalent to the congregatio credentium, but also sociologically, as a parallel to the system of kumi, neighbourhood groups bound together by common interest and charged by the authorities with common accountability for their behaviour. The kumi system was in fact used by the Japanese government as a means of detecting and extirpating Christianity; Fujiwara points out that if a confraria coincided with a kumi, then the all-Christian nature of the latter made it into an effective local instrument of subversion of the anti-Christian strategy. On the other hand, there is also evidence, not addressed in this volume, of subversion in the opposite direction: the tightly organised and secretive ‘hidden Christian’ organisations could become easily prone to syncretisation, as in remote communities they became assimilated to the religious and social norms of village life.
The treatment given to the later periods of Japanese Christian history is generally more focused on explicit theology; the third of these chapters in particular includes a sustained discussion of three major twentieth-century theologians, Kazoh Kitamori, Yasuo Furuya and Hideo Ohki (probably the best known of all Japanese theologians, Kosuke Koyama, is notable by his absence). This part of the book is rather more abstract, and for me less immediately engaging; nevertheless, Fujiwara’s monograph is at its most creative in these analytic and descriptive historical chapters, rather than in the expository ecclesiology of the earlier part. Despite a number of irritating misprints, and at times a certain repetitive quality, this book is well worth exploring for the range of material it presents and discusses from the history of Christian faith in this most complex and intriguing of cultures.