The Holy Scripture Through the Eyes of the Japanese Underground Christians: the Book "Tenchi Hajimari-no Koto" ("The Beginning of Heaven and Earth")

Abstract

The article analyses Tenchi Hajimari-no Koto (“The Beginning of Heaven and Earth”), one of the rare written monuments of the Japanese underground Christians and a unique example of interaction between Western Christian and Japanese traditions. The aim is to reconstruct a specific understanding of the Holy Scripture by the people, who were for a long time cut off from any connection with Christianity. The text represents a mixture of various traditions and motifs, some of which are taken from the Holy Scripture and Western medieval Christian legends or borrowed from Japanese myths and folk tales, and some were made up by Japanese believers themselves. Tenchi Hajimari-no Koto reinterprets in a “Japanese” way the main Christian doctrines concerning the nature of God and the Holy Trinity, or the meaning of the Atonement. On one hand, the story becomes, indeed, more “Japanese,” on the other-it creates its own specific language and semiotic system, its own faith, not purely Christian or purely Japanese, which can be fully understood only by a narrow circle of “the chosen.”