Most of Japan’s Catholic bishops do not want their country to build up its military, and support retention of their constitution’s “peace clause,” says Nagasaki Archbishop Joseph Mitsuaki Takami. The Church leader, speaking to UCA News recently while visiting Rome, said he hopes the new government, led by Yukio Hatoyama, will not change Article 9 in the constitution.
That clause is “very important” in curbing militarization, he said.
The Japanese people, the clause says, “forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.”
Born in Nagasaki on March 21, 1946, Archbishop Takami was in his mother’s womb when the United States dropped an atomic bomb there. Almost 74,000 people died instantly, and at least 25,000 more in the years that followed. Among them were the archbishop’s grandmother, two aunts and a cousin.
Archbishop Takami told UCA News that besides militarization, another major challenge facing Japan’s Catholic Church is evangelization.
The Catholic Church in Japan has about 1 million members, but less than half are native Japanese. The majority are Brazilian, Filipino, Korean and Chinese migrants who have brought new life and resources to the Church, the archbishop said.
He acknowledged that Pope John Paul II’s historic 1981 trip to Japan, where he visited Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Tokyo, inspired the whole Catholic community.
The bishops feel they have to do “something new” to evangelize, he added, and are planning to issue a letter on this, perhaps in 2010.
The archbishop also responded to a question about a reported comment by Ichiro Ozawa, secretary general of Japan’s ruling Democratic Party, that “Christianity is an exclusive, self-righteous religion,” he said.
Ozawa “has some reason” for his statement, in the attitudes Churches have taken in history, Archbishop Takami remarked.
“We exclude when we consider another religion as nothing, and when we consider ourselves to be right and the others to be wrong.” Likewise, Japan was also being exclusive “when it expelled missionaries and denounced Christianity as a bad religion,” he said.
Nonetheless, “the Christian Gospel is absolutely good and a supreme value and I believe in it,” the Japanese prelate asserted. “We don’t always live exactly according to the Gospel, and that is a problem, and we recognize it.”
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