Abstract
The presence of foreigner workers in Japan has had a great impact on the local Catholic Church. I will point out to data, which shows that the number of foreign believers has overtaken the number of Japanese believers. As a transnational religious institution, cooperation between the churches, which came from different countries, and Japanese Catholic churches would be the expected way to attend to the pastoral care of those Catholics. However, several conflicts have blocked that solution. Tensions and conflicts arise from the distinct understanding of organization of the local church and different command “centers” (such as National Bishops Conferences and the charismatic movement administrations). The article focuses initially on the intra-religious tensions resulting from the transplantation of a Pastoral Nipo-Brasileira—PANIB and the charismatic communities from Brazil to Japan. Further, I will show how the Catholic Church in Japan has adopted multiculturalism as the center of its policies of action aiming to become a model within Japanese society. All cases here presented have failed to offer an appropriate answer to the challenge of contemporary immigration with the Catholic Church.
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Notes
The Nikkei’s from the Philippines only had the right to obtain the working visa in the past years but with a different status from South Americans.
I would posit that the believer system of registration is a continuation of the danka seido and tera-uke certification system used against Christianity since the Tokugawa period. As argued by Mullins “the system was localized, however, and did not provide means of unifying the nation—for the most part it served to firmly link Buddhist temples with individual households or extended families (ie)” (Mullins 1998: 7).
These estimates were made combining three sources: the number of foreigners residing in Japan according to the statistics of the Ministry of Justice, the number of foreigners registered with local governments (Gaikokujin Toroku), and the percentage of Catholics in the migrants’ country of origin based on Vatican figures. The Vatican figures, in turn, are based on the number of baptisms reported by the Catholic Church’s official data in each country.
PANIB continues to hold its “civic-religious” status that grants a certain independent status in relation to the normal territorial parishes’ organizations and directly connected to the CNBB. As it is registered in its statutes, the association aims at the integration of the Nipo-Brazilian community in the local Church. The four personal parishes still exist but three of them have already been amalgamated with territorial parishes. Even though some tensions in that process seem to be an avoidable stage in the ethnic religious communities: its total assimilation into the local community. Sunday mass in Japanese is held only in two places. Besides those parishes, many missionaries and lay people continue to assist the communities throughout the country. Presently, there are 16 Japanese priests and 6 Nikkei’s or from other origins that know the Japanese language. There are also 39 Japanese sisters and 24 Nikkeys. The association publishes a monthly magazine called Horizonte with 800 copies and the weekly Sunday mass liturgical pamphlets with 450 copies.
Mr. Edno Monteiro who became a leader of the CCR in Japan for a period has gently written the report of those contacts and of the development of facts here described.
According the ecclesiastical regulations, those kinds of collection demand a permission from the local bishop.
Even if the movement had succeeded among Brazilians, I argue that the movement would face certain difficulty to reach Japanese believers since the market for the healing and exorcism already occupied by Shinto priests.
Here, Adam Smith in the Fifth Book, article three of The Wealth of Nations would be of a help for a deeper understanding of the question; however, that discussion is beyond the scope of this paper.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge Prof. Dr. James Heisig from Nanzan University who was the advisor of my master’s thesis, which is the basis for the present article. I also want to acknowledge Ms. Mituko Sadashima and Mr. Edno Monteiro who have helped me to gather and update data and information described here.
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de Oliveira, A.G.C. From a “Foreign Religion” to a “Religion of Foreigners”: the Challenge of Contemporary Immigration to the Catholic Church in Japan. Int J Lat Am Relig 1, 270–295 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41603-017-0023-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41603-017-0023-4