Paper short abstract:

“Hidden Christians” in the Gotō Archipelago in the 18th and 19th centuries escaped from persecution to establish settlements in difficult terrain and extreme climate. This presentation will aim to consider how we might understand the environment of the Gotō from the perspective of locals today.

Paper long abstract:

The movement of “Hidden Christians” into the Gotō Archipelago in the 18th and 19th centuries represented their escape from persecutions, to the establishment of settlements in difficult terrain and in climatically extreme circumstances. Twelve UNESCO World Heritage sites in South-West Japan were registered in 2018 as ‘Hidden Christian sites’, to reflect the long prohibition of Christianity as well as its re-emergence after 1873. This paper will introduce my new research (supported by the Japan Foundation and the National Library of Australia) here and an oral history survey. I hope this oral history will allow us to understand better the development of their disparate religious landscapes and communities, but also the peoples’ relationships with that landscape and its transformations by refugees, multiple migrations, plus depopulation and rewilding, that decentres the Anthropocene. This is evident as houses are returned to forests, inoshishi (wild boar) descend on fields and distance becomes more pronounced. It has been noted that oral history, local and regional analyses offer important perspectives that have often been ignored. In this project, as such, I take Williams and Riley’s comment seriously: “The experiential, embodied, and situated element of human-environmental practices are an asset of oral testimonies, rather than a liability”. I will therefore focus in this paper not only on the UNESCO World Heritage sites, but also the wider landscape and sites mentioned as important or sacred by the interviewees.

This paper intends to build a foundation for a new understanding of the diversity of the community in the Gotō, its landscape and non-human environment. In late 2022 I interviewed 17 people, including Catholics, Buddhists and Hidden Christian descendants. I am developing a collaborative approach in my project to engagement in the writing of environmental history. Some of the community members included a Catholic who lives in a shrinking community still unreachable by road, a Buddhist ‘pilgrim’s guide’, and an 88 year-old ‘Hidden Christian’ descendant who tends her garden each day. It is the interviewees’ stories that will guide us to unravelling those relationships between the people, and the oceanic environment.