The Conversion of a Village

The war did not damage the low, thatch-and tile-roofed houses of the Japanese village of Saga, in the Honshu countryside 60 miles northwest of Kyoto. But in peaceful Saga (pop. 2,500), as everywhere in Japan, the defeat shook the complex structures of Shinto and Buddhism which had served most Japanese as religion.

This year Saga's cautious bamboo-shoot farmers realized with shocked surprise what a spiritual vacuum was left: in January's general election, 37 of their young people voted Communist. Saga's conservative toshiyori (elders) lost no time in calling a town meeting to talk it over. Up stood prosperous Farmer Sakuji Takahashi with a ready-made solution. In the big city of Kyoto, said Sakuji, he had heard Msgr. Paul Furuya, a Japanese Roman Catholic priest, preach to some new converts. The monsignor's brand of religion, he argued, looked like just what Saga needed. The villagers agreed. Farmer Takahashi and ex-Mayor Hitoshi Kataoka were commissioned to invite the Catholics to town.

Bishop Taguchi of Osaka and Msgr. Furuya accepted. Led by Takahashi and Kataoka, resplendent in dusty morning coats, 800 villagers crammed the town hall to attend Mass, while hundreds more, in their best go-to-meeting clothes, waited patiently outside. When it was over, a village spokesman pledged Saga's entire population to "throw away the world of superstition and embrace the true faith."

Next day a priest of the diocese, wiry, plain-spoken Father Utaka Itagura, began instructions. From 4 in the morning to nearly midnight each day, his eager postulants came in groups of 60. "Most of them thought they could become Catholics in a hurry," he laughed. By August, he hopes, some of them may be ready for baptism, but he is making no promises.

Already Saga's little cell of Communists has wilted under the pressure. On the second day of the instruction classes, a group of Red hecklers were so effectively silenced by an onslaught of Thomist dialectics that they have not shown up since.

Last week one of Saga's five Buddhist priests watched the black-cassocked figure of his new friend, Father Itagura, descending the ancient steps of the Buddhist temple after a chatty afternoon visit. Though he may soon be without a flock, he was not bitter. "You see," he observed with true Buddhist detachment, "whether God says a thing or Buddha says it, it's still the same message. I only wish, and wish very strongly, that everyone may kneel with a beautiful heart before the altar of God."

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