Reviewed by: La foi des ancêtres: Chrétiens cachés et catholiques dans la société villageoise japonaise XVIIe–XIXe siècles by Martin Nogueira Ramos Nathalie Kouamé La foi des ancêtres: Chrétiens cachés et catholiques dans la société villageoise japonaise XVIIe–XIXe siècles. By Martin Nogueira Ramos. Paris: CNRS Editions, 2019. 416 pages. Hardcover, €25.00. One of the main attractions of this book is that Martin Nogueira Ramos draws abundantly from two distinct traditions of historiography and succeeds in making them complementary. The first of these traditions is an international one consisting of [End Page 362] research on the first Christians in Japan. This line of inquiry began in the 1870s with Hirai Kishō, was continued by Murakami Naojirō and then Anesaki Masaharu, and then developed further in the 1930s with the emergence of the journal Monumenta Nipponica; it then entered a kind of postwar golden age with the publication of Western-language masterworks such as La Compagnie de Jésus et le Japon by Léon Bourdon, The Christian Century in Japan by Charles Boxer, and Deus Destroyed by George Elison in addition to studies by Okamoto Yoshitomo and Okada Akio in Japan. The second tradition upon which Ramos's work rests, a wholly Japanese one, is the study of the social history of Japanese religions, which has advanced markedly since the 1990s, notably as a result of increasing emphasis on the question of the social status (mibun) of religious persons. Both the content and the style of Ramos's book (a revised version of his doctoral thesis) clearly derive from these two main currents of scholarship. From the first tradition we see the fascination of a number of historians with the Christians of Japan, and from the second, a focus on human relations and the social fabric, particularly the framework of village life in premodern and modern Japan from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth. Ramos however succeeds in avoiding the pitfalls inherent in the two traditions. He does not give way to religious sectarianism, instead remaining rigorously objective, and he does not hesitate to take into consideration the spiritual and existential character of the people he is examining, thus enabling himself to go beyond "basic" sociological considerations. Ramos's definition of what constitutes a "hidden Christian" is of particular interest given that he has stripped it of all romance or religious bias. "From the 1630s onward," Ramos writes, "Christians did all they could to hide their religion from view of the authorities. They might be described using the term Crypto-Christian or hidden Christian" (p. 70). And so, finally, we have a Western specialist clearly establishing the true nature of these individuals or groups of individuals, who have all too often been considered invisible. Ramos characterizes hidden Christians not as a population unnoticed by and unknown to those around them but as one whose members concealed and disguised themselves even though their neighbors and superiors might have been perfectly aware of their beliefs and religious practices. On several occasions Ramos emphasizes how Edo-period local authorities turned a blind eye to the existence of these groups, mainly because hidden Christians were almost all peasants, artisans, or fishermen, or in other words a source of tax income that they did not wish to jeopardize. To me, this is doubtless why Christian communities were able to survive over two and a half centuries. Ramos also deserves ample praise for his analytic method, specifically his combination of European sources, including missionary letters and testimonies by religious believers, with Japanese sources such as investigative reports. When Ramos is able to collate these two categories of sources, his findings are stimulating: in examining the question of the internal hierarchy of mid-nineteenth-century Christian communities (pp. 98–103), for example, he tellingly juxtaposes the testimony of Bernard-Thadée Petitjean, a priest of the foreign missions in Paris (Missions [End Page 363] étrangères de Paris) who in March 1865 "discovered" Christians living in Japan, with a report produced some years earlier in 1856 by Japanese investigators during the third "dismantlement" of the hidden Christians of Urakami. The...