When you travel with a mission, a theme in mind, encounters unfold, stories are forthcoming, history uncoils. John Dougill begins his own journey into the history of Japan's hidden Christians in Tanegashima, where the Portuguese, bearing matchlocks and bibles, first landed.
Perhaps memories of the failure of the Crusades continued to rankle in the corridors of the Vatican or Escorial. In the age of oceanic exploration, the Catholic Church was reinvigorated by the prospect of making converts in the East.
Unlike colonized regions of Asia where Catholicism thrived, the imported religion in Japan conflicted with loyalty to the shogun. There was also, as the writer explains, the problem of ancestor worship. The notion that non-Christian members of the family might be dispatched into a fiery damnation made many Japanese as uncomfortable as the concept of confession, in a society where people were taught to keep their private thoughts and emotions in check. Suicide, a virtue according to samurai culture, was a sin in the Catholic one.