SEEK AND YOU WILL FIND

ATTENDING A CATHOLIC CHURCH IN JAPAN TAKES A LITTLE SEARCHING, BUT WE FOUND OUR COMMUNITY

BY GREG HARDESTY

ON OUR RECENT honeymoon in Japan, my wife and I attended Mass in a country where Catholicism is very much a minority religion.

Most Japanese, traditionally, are of the Shinto or Buddhist faith.

As of 2021, there were only about 431,100 Catholics in Japan, or 0.34% of the total population, according to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Japan.

Compare this to Orange County, where there are 1.3 million Catholics – more than 40% of the population.

Not surprisingly, finding a Roman Catholic church to attend on a Sunday in Japan can pose some minor challenges – especially outside the megalopolis of Tokyo.

It can be a conveniently forgotten thing to do while traveling abroad, but it remained a must for us to experience in Japan.

Cherry Blossoms And Trains

Midway through our trip at the height of cherry blossom season in late March and early April, we visited Nara, a popular tourist city known for its park of roaming deer. Nara is a 45-minute train ride from the ancient capital of Kyoto.

We found an 11 a.m. service at Catholic Nara Church. We got there early and

CONTINUES ON PAGE 7 visited the grounds of the attached elementary school.

As Mass time approached and we didn’t see a lot of people arriving, we found some friendly locals exiting the church office and asked them, in broken Japanese, if Mass would be held as scheduled.

No, a kind gentleman told us. The priest was filling in at another parish today so there would be no 11 a.m. service.

A Filipino woman and her daughter, longtime residents of Nara, happened to be there and told us in English they would be attending a 1 p.m. service in a nearby town that was about 20 minutes away by train.

After killing some time at a restaurant, we saw the two on a train to Yamatokoriyama, a city with four Shinto shrines, five Buddhist temples, and one Catholic Church.

Yamatokoriyama Church is a 10-minute walk from the train station through a pleasant suburban area in a city known for its cultivation of goldfish, rice, strawberries and tomatoes.

The church has a monument that commemorates Nagasaki Christians who were caught as heretics in 1870 after the Meiji Restoration and were forcibly deported to the city. Among Japanese Catholics, especially revered are 26 martyrs who were crucified in 1597 in Nagasaki.

It was Palm Sunday.

Hidden Christians

From 1989 to 1995, I lived in Japan in the Tokyo and Yokohama area. While an editor and a writer for The Japan Times newspaper, I visited the Goto Islands in the East China Sea.

Located off the western coast of Kyushu and part of Nagasaki Prefecture, the five-island archipelago has numerous Catholic churches. Portuguese missionaries introduced Catholicism to the port city of Nagasaki in the late

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