Travel writer, Japan: ‘The town of Unzen sits in a bowl of steaming, gurgling volcanic hills’

South of Nagasaki City the town of Unzen sits in a bowl of steaming, gurgling volcanic hills. It began as a Buddhist complex in the 8th century when the monks thought the shrieks of steam gushing from volcanic vents sounded like the screams of the damned in hell.

Today it draws more tourists than pilgrims. Dense networks of rusty pipes suck its volcanic spring water up into the hotels that line the main street, for Japanese tourists who come to soak naked together in the scalding baths. I had heard that the absence of the workplace’s hierarchy of uniforms allowed them find a harmonious equality, sometimes called a ‘naked communion’.

The centre of Unzen is lively with clouds of sulphurous steam and little mud volcanoes plopping to the pleasure of beaming tourists, but on the wooded fringes a web of narrow paths connect the older religious sites. Once I passed a Japanese couple returning from a small Shinto shrine in the forest, nodding at me in polite bemusement as I plodded obliviously up through the trees. It turned out to be a fertility shrine, with tins of tuna and coffee jars left as sacrifices before a chest-high stone phallus.

I was in an Unzen hotel another night to see a local Gospel choir who belted out Christian hymns, swaying and clapping and crying ‘Hallelujah!’ before a lobby of sleepy guests. They sang their hymns joyfully, while outside the sulphurous fog drifted in the darkness over the Shinto shrines. Many of the singers were Christian.

Less than one per cent of Japan is Christian today but four hundred years ago it had all but replaced Buddhism in the area around Nagasaki. The religion came with Portuguese traders in the mid-16th century, when Japan’s warring lords coveted the educated Jesuit missionaries with their sophisticated technologies. By 1600 about two per cent of the Japanese population was Christian, especially in the south around Nagasaki where their confrontations with indigenous culture were beginning to arouse opposition. Already the blunt Francis Xavier had condemned Japanese for ‘idolatry’ and tolerance of homosexuality. I imagine he would have blushed furiously at Unzen’s phallic Shinto shrine.

After Japan was unified in the 1580s the mood changed and Jesuits were feared to be the vanguard of a Spanish invasion since Christian missionaries had preceded their conquest of the Philippines. Soon Christianity was banned, the Spanish and Portuguese expelled, and thousands of Japanese believers executed. Christians were burned alive, crucified, beheaded, suspended in excrement and, in Unzen, tossed bodily into the steaming sulphuric vents to boil to death. Today the Catholic church in nearby Shimabara has stained glass depictions of these volcanic tortures in its windows.

A desperate final Christian rebellion in 1637 was crushed. The scale of destruction was such that a Japanese friend told me her ancestors had been brought into the area to repopulate it after the annihilation of the Christians. Hara Castle, the scene of their last stand, is a mere grassy mound today.

Persecuted for centuries, a few Japanese believers went underground, forging secret rosary beads from the musket balls of the rebellion. When a French priest opened a chapel near Nagasaki as Japan opened up in the 1860s he was stunned to find much of the local village turning up to pray.

Back in Unzen the Gospel choir finished with Amazing Grace.

In many places the torments of the past are clung to and inspire modern malice. In Unzen, the sleepy Shinto-Buddhist hotel guests gave the singers a final round of applause and shambled off to bed. One old quarrel, at least, had come to peace.

[ Irish Times Amateur Travel Writer Competition ]