After nearly a hundred years of Christianity and foreign intercourse, the only apparent results of this contact with another religion and civilization were the adoption of gunpowder and firearms as weapons, the use of tobacco and the habit of smoking, the making of sponge-cake (still called Castira -- the Japanese form of Castile), the naturalization into the language of a few foreign words, the introduction of new and strange forms of disease, and the permanent addition to that catalogue of terrors which priest and magistrate in Asiatic countries ever hold as weapons to overawe the herd.
So thoroughly was Christianity supposed to be eradicated before the end of the seventeenth century, that its existence was historical, remembered only as an awful scar on the national memory. It was left to our day, since the recent opening of Japan, for them to discover that a mighty fire had been smoldering for over two centuries beneath the ashes of persecution.
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From General Nelson A. Miles
Thrilling Stories of The Russian-Japanese War, 1904
