SOURCE: Burkman, Thomas W. “The Historical Novels of Endo Shusaku: Alien Christianity in the “Mud-Swamp” of Japan.” Fides et Historia 26, no. 1 (winter-spring 1994): 99-111.

In the following essay, Burkman addresses Endō's artistic handling of the incompatibility of Western religion with Japanese culture.

The National Christian Council of Japan in 1991 published a thorough review of the state of Christianity in Japan covering the two decades since 1971. It is widely known in Christian circles that baptized believers in Japan number about one percent of the population. The 1970 statistics indeed revealed that Japan's 722,942 Protestants and 371,148 Catholics constituted 1.06 percent of the population. The interesting revelation in the 1991 report is that, while the Japanese citizenry by 1991 had increased by some 21 million, the number of Christian adherents had actually dropped by 2,056, with the result that the Christian portion of the population stood at 0.88 percent.¹

Japan has a long history of borrowing and ingesting culture...