As late as 1829 seven persons, six men and an old woman, were crucified in Osaka, on suspicion of being Christians, and communicating with foreigners. When the French brethren of the Mission Apostolique, of Paris, came to Nagasaki, in 1860, they found in the villages around them over ten thousand people who held the faith of their fathers of the seventeenth century.
The Japanese mental constitution and moral character have been profoundly modified in turn by Shintoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, but the early waves of Christianity that passed over Japan left no sediment teeming with the fertility, rather a barren waste like that which the river floods leave in autumn. The leaven has been at work, however, and the indications are that the Christianity of the present will bring about a revolution in faith and moral practice.
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From General Nelson A. Miles
Thrilling Stories of The Russian-Japanese War, 1904
