From Concealment to Heritage

This article examines the historical formation and contemporary significance of Kirishitan shrines (Kirishitan jinja) in Nagasaki Prefecture. Rather than viewing Kakure Kirishitan survival primarily as the preservation of Christian practice beneath Buddhist, Shinto and local ritual forms, this article examines how concealment generated new ritual practices, sacred spaces and modes of communal memory. The significance of these developments lies not only in what was preserved but also in what emerged through historical adaptation. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork (2004–25), three case studies—the Karematsu shrine, the Kuwahime shrine and the Tsumoriko shrine network—demonstrate how Christian devotion, ancestral veneration and vernacular shrine traditions became so thoroughly interwoven that conventional distinctions between Christianity, Shinto and folk religion prove inadequate. Situating these shrines within Tokugawa persecution, Meiji shrine reorganization and the 2018 UNESCO World Heritage inscription, and engaging Assmann’s cultural memory framework and Riis and Woodhead’s model of religious meaning-making, the article argues that what is conceptualized here as “sacred visibility” is not a stable condition but a historically produced, communally negotiated and politically contested field of religious life.