March - 2009: Two Unique Issues for Japanese Christians

"The concerns of Christianity in Asia have been quite different from the problems the churches in the North faced in the past century—secularisation and modernisation. Most Asian countries went through complex and overwhelming encounters with poverty and socio-economic and political injustice, on the one hand, and the experience of being minorities in religiously pluralistic contexts on the other." [Sebastian C. H. Kim, "The Future Shape of Christianity from an Asian Perspective," in Global Christianity: Contested Claims, 72]

Although I am extremely uncomfortable with the idea that there is a unified "Asian Christianity," the fact is that the development of the Christian faith in different countries throughout Asia-Pacific has been influenced by a unique set of complex socio-economic and ideological factors. Two crucial issues that Japanese Christians face may be: 1) "the experience of being minorities in religiously pluralistic context;" and 2) the struggle to deal with westernization over against the development of an indigenous identity.