A group of young Tokyo Catholics spend time together searching for the roots of Christianity in Japan. Their first journey is to the birthplace of Catholicism and martyrdom.

Tokyo (AsiaNews/JCN) – A group of young Japanese Catholics had decided to find the roots of Christianity in Japan by organising meetings and pilgrimages across the country. The Shinsei Kaikan Youth Centre in Tokyo organised the first such event, a pilgrimage to places where its first representatives suffered martyrdom, to better understand the origins of Japanese Catholicism.

Shibata Yoko, 23, from Shizuoka parish, said she came with joy because since high school "no matter how much I thought about it [martyrdom], I could not understand it."

It all began when she read Endo Shusaku's novel Silence, a story of the persecution of Christians in Japan. "I know that to die a martyr is splendid but I feel it is necessary to study the historical facts one by one."

Shibata and four friends along with two priests spent two weeks in March on a pilgrimage that took them to Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yamaguchi, Shizuoka and Nagasaki to retrace the path taken by the Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki, whom John Paul II compared to the early martyrs of Christianity for their fortitude. They travelled to places where the first Kirishitan (Japanese converts to Christians) lived in the second half of the 16th century.

At the Historical Materials Museum in Yamaguchi, 21-year-old Mana Ide of the Saku Church in Nagano saw for the first time a letter written by a martyred missionary. She was surprised to find the missionary writing that he had no fear, describing martyrdom as something magnificent.

"I thought how different our way is of expressing our faith," Ide said. "But I also thought that our love for God is not different."

At the end of the experience, another pilgrim, Toshiro Ogaki, proposed to spend a while together thinking about the Church in Japan and how the martyrs accepted their fate.

• japan
• pilgrimage
• japanese
• martyrs
• kirishitan