On Japan’s Catholic Outposts, Faith Abides Even As The Churches Dwindle

SHINKAMIGOTO, Japan — Fringed with sheer cliffs and the narrowest strips of flat land, covered in mountains of dense forest, the islands of the Goto Archipelago of Japan are some of the country’s most remote and forbidding. And yet atop hills overlooking fishing villages, reached by bridges and serpentine roads paved over just a generation ago, rise the steeples of Roman Catholic churches.

Ohso Church, in the background, is one of the 29 Roman Catholic churches left in Shinkamigoto. Several churches have closed in recent years.

Japan’s persecuted Christians fled here centuries ago, seeking to practice their faith in one of the country’s southwesternmost reaches. They eventually forged Roman Catholic communities found nowhere else in Japan, villages where everyone was Catholic, life revolved around the parish and even the school calendar yielded to the church’s.

Today, one quarter of the roughly 25,000 inhabitants of the district, a collection of seven inhabited islands and 60 uninhabited ones, are Roman Catholic, an extraordinary percentage in a country where Christianity failed to take root. It is by far the highest level in Japan, where Catholics account for about one-third of 1 percent of the overall population and where the total number of Christians amounts to less than 1 percent.

But like Japan’s Roman Catholicism in general, this redoubt is also losing its vitality for reasons both familiar to Catholics in other wealthy nations and peculiar to Japan. Young Catholics here are loosening their ties to the church, their spiritual needs fulfilled elsewhere. Those who have left for the cities are marrying non-Catholics and are being absorbed into an overwhelmingly non-Christian culture.

Several churches have closed here in recent years. The membership is graying and dwindling at many of the surviving 29 churches, especially at those on the islands’ least accessible corners.

“The situation here is severe — a question of which churches will be abandoned next,” said the Rev. Shigeshi Oyama, 61, who, because of a shortage of priests, celebrated Mass at two churches on the Fifth Sunday of Lent recently.

Parishioners arrived at Hiyamizu Church for the 7 a.m. Mass, ascending a steep concrete stairway to reach a small wooden white building with a red roof. They took off their shoes at the entrance, in keeping with the custom at many Japanese churches, and stepped onto the church’s cold, though carpeted, floor. Mostly elderly, with the women hewing to tradition by covering their heads with white veils, they listened to the liturgy on the raising of Lazarus.

After Mass, one of the few younger members, Toshiyuki Mori, 40, stood outside in the courtyard, smoking a cigarette and peering down at a small bay that a solitary boat was silently crossing. An irregular churchgoer, Mr. Mori had brought his son, Tomoyuki, 8, an altar boy, to church on this morning.

Much of Mr. Mori’s boyhood had centered on the parish, and he had married a woman of the same faith. But unlike their parents, the young couple had lost the habit of praying before meals or attending Mass.

It was not that their lives now were so busy, Mr. Mori said. “I guess my faith gradually faded,” he said.

He said he would not compel his son to remain a Catholic, adding, “Once he becomes aware to a certain degree, he can quit if that’s what he wants.”

For now, though, his son said, school was more fun than church.

“But Father Oyama bought us sweets,” the boy added. “And the day before yesterday, he bought us ice cream, for everybody up to sixth grade.”

Japan’s Catholic population — 452,571 in 2006, or 0.35 percent of the country’s total population of 127 million — is believed to have peaked, said the Rev. Ritsuo Hisashi, a spokesman at the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Japan in Tokyo.

The church is grappling with problems like a shortage of young Japanese priests and nuns. In the diocese of Naha, in Okinawa, priests from Vietnam and the Philippines have come to fill the posts, Father Hisashi said.

Most Japanese follow a combination of Buddhism and Shintoism, though Christmas and weddings in chapels, stripped of their religious meaning, have taken root in Japanese society.

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