Private faith: Social memory, gender and the Roman Catholic Church in contemporary Tokyo

Abstract

It is not uncommon for Japanese Catholic women to conceal their religious identity from their family, relatives and colleagues. This paper examines the ‘private faith’ of such Japanese Catholic women in contemporary Tokyo. It situates their choice to hide their religious identity at the intersections of several discursive fields, and examines lay Catholic's negotiated identity from three angles: historical consciousness, gender and institutional change. In particular, the paper studies negative historical consciousness about religion, married women's domestic cultic roles which are dominated by Buddhist idioms and the shift of emphasis to religious tolerance on the part of the Roman Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council of the 1960's.