Japan’s Christians Confront A New Nationalism They Remember Too Well
OSAKA, Japan — On a Sunday morning in late July, with a heatwave warning hanging over the city, the congregation of a small Baptist church in Osaka lingered long after the service ended. Japanese worshippers and immigrants stood in mixed clusters, trading greetings and small kindnesses — a bottle of water pressed into a hand, advice on getting home before the worst of the heat.
The conversation kept returning to a single theme: how faith had given the foreigners in the room something Japan's politics increasingly denies them: a family away from home.
It is a fragile kind of belonging. Christians make up roughly one percent of Japan’s population — about 1.9 million adherents, according to the Agency for Cultural Affairs' annual Religious Yearbook. It is a community that has survived a 250-year ban under the shoguns, the torture and martyrdom of its faithful and forced submission to the wartime emperor cult.
Now, as Japanese politics takes its sharpest nationalist turn in decades, that history is resurfacing in sermons, church statements and the anxieties of congregations increasingly filled with the very foreign workers the new politics target.
The turn has been rapid. In July 2025, the far-right party Sanseito won 14 seats in the country’s upper house election on a “Japanese First” platform, becoming an unlikely force in national politics. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party responded by choosing Sanae Takaichi, the candidate who campaigned hardest on restricting foreign residents, as its leader and Japan's first female prime minister. In February 2026, she led the LDP to a landslide lower house victory of 316 seats — the largest of any post-war government — in the first general election where the so-called “foreigner issue” featured prominently.
The policies have followed. In January, the government unveiled a framework titled Comprehensive Measures for Accepting Foreign Nationals and Orderly Coexistence, promising tougher crackdowns on rule violations, tighter permanent residency and naturalization requirements, and deliberations on restricting land purchases by foreign nationals.
The past May, the national legislature enacted a tenfold increase in the maximum fee for extending or changing residency status, from 10,000 to 100,000 yen (from $70 to more than $600). Takaichi has insisted her government draws a line against prejudice, saying during a policy meeting that it would act "while clearly distinguishing ourselves from xenophobia."
Scholars are unconvinced. Sachi Takaya, a sociologist at the University of Tokyo, told Religion Unplugged that while the administration claims to separate its governance from prejudice, government policy is xenophobic in practice — and that Sanseito has succeeded in shifting national attention, aggressively politicizing the "foreigners" issue and pulling the mainstream parties along with it. For Japan's churches, none of this feels new.
A memory of compromise
The Christian encounter with Japanese nationalism is one of the most painful institutional memories in world Christianity. After Catholic missionaries arrived in the sixteenth century, the faith was banned outright in the early 1600s; believers were crucified, burned and driven underground for two and a half centuries, surviving as the kakure kirishitan, the hidden Christians of Kyushu, whose descendants still practice remnants of the faith today.
When the ban lifted in the Meiji era, acceptance remained conditional. In 1891, the Christian intellectual Uchimura Kanzo was hounded out of his teaching post for failing to bow deeply enough before the Emperor's signature on the Imperial Rescript on Education — an incident that became a defining parable of the impossibility, in that era, of being publicly both Christian and Japanese.
The darkest chapter came in 1941, when the wartime state, acting under the Religious Organizations Law, forced 33 Protestant denominations to merge into a single body it could control: the United Church of Christ in Japan, known as the Kyodan. The new church pledged loyalty to the throne and served the war effort. It took a generation to reckon with what that meant.
In 1967, the Kyodan issued its Confession of Responsibility During World War II, openly repenting its wartime complicity. It was an act of institutional self-examination with few parallels among the world's churches. It anchored Japanese Protestantism's post-war opposition to remilitarisation, state visits to Yasukuni Shrine and the revival of emperor-centered nationalism ever since.
That memory now shapes how church bodies read the government's next legislative push. The ruling coalition has committed to fast-tracking an anti-espionage law and a foreign agent registration act, with bills expected in the autumn session of the national legislature.
A senior figure at the National Christian Council in Japan, the ecumenical umbrella founded in 1948, told Religion Unplugged that the council and broader civil society groups are deeply concerned about the proposals, warning that broad definitions of espionage and foreign agency could threaten religious freedom, free speech and the pacifist advocacy that has defined Japanese Christianity since the war. For a faith with extensive international ties — mission boards, ecumenical councils, foreign-born clergy — the phrase "foreign agent" lands with particular weight.
The NCCJ’s concern is not abstract. Through its Human Rights of Foreign Residents Committee, the council works alongside the Christian Coalition for Refugees and Foreign Migrant Workers from a shared office in Tokyo's Japan Christian Center, placing it on the front line of exactly the communities the new politics has singled out.
The pews are changing
There is an irony at the center of this story: at the very moment Japanese politics has turned against foreigners, Japan’s churches are being sustained by them. Foreign workers in Japan reached a record 2.57 million in 2025, and a significant share of the Filipinos, Vietnamese, Brazilians and Nepalis among them are Christian. In many parishes, particularly across the industrial Kansai region, migrant worshippers now sit in the pews that aging Japanese congregations can no longer fill.
Cardinal Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi of Tokyo, who also leads Caritas Internationalis, has described migrant Catholics as missionaries to Japan, arguing that a church of many nationalities praying together is itself a form of witness in a society he says tends toward exclusion and nationalism — a community of "unity in diversity."
In Osaka, that welcome and that anxiety coexist. Rajesh Kumar, a Nepali Christian who works at Chandrama, a restaurant in the city, said the people and culture of Japan have been genuinely welcoming to him. But he worries about what the government's course means for livelihoods like his: the visa fee hike will hit tourism, he said, and rising temperatures are already thinning the number of visitors. The government, he believes, should be doing more to attract tourists, not less — for workers like him, tourism is what pays the bills.
His worry captures the gap the churches now occupy: a state narrowing the terms of belonging and congregations quietly widening them.
Japan's Christians have been here before. They were told once that faith in Christ and loyalty to the nation were incompatible, and they paid for the accusation in blood and compromise. What they do now — as the definition of Japaneseness narrows again — will be shaped less by their numbers, which are vanishingly small, than by a memory most of Japan has been allowed to forget.
Back in the Osaka church, as the congregation finally stepped out into the heat, the scene made the argument on its own: strangers checking on strangers, directions offered, water shared. For an hour on a Sunday, at least, no one in the room was a foreigner.
Rishabh Jain is an independent journalist based in Delhi. Follow him at @ThisIsRjain.