A research on the indigenization of Catholicism in Nagasaki prefecture and the Amakusa island.

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This study is a part of the research of the Japanese understanding and acceptance for Catholicism. I am pursuing my studies on the Kakure-Kirishitan in Japan for more than 20 years and at the same time, on the Christian History from the 16th century to the underground era in Japan by using historical literature. This study tries to clear up if there is a difference of the characters between the old Christians who has traditions of the Edo period and the most of them live in rural area in Japan and the new Christians recently converted into Catholic who mostly live in big towns.Because the Kakure-Kirishitan assimilates so much into many Japanese native religions, I imagined that the old hereditary Christian's faith has been transfigured into very,Japanese like one. Yet to my surprise, I couldn't recognize the significant differences between them.First of all, we can point out that the one of the reasons is the universality which has the global religion called Catholic. From the beginning of Meiji era, the Paris Mission's missionaries very strongly gave strict and conservative catholic education to Japanese. The influence still now strongly remains. The Japanese believers also obeyed submissively to the foreign Missionaries, however their instructions were very much severe, and that was rather to remunerate the devoted efforts to Japanese coming from a long distance than to believe the Christianity itself.