THIS COMM HAS MOVED
Us dutchies after promising not to spread this bs:
It's all that Calvinism. Predestination and the Elect and shit. "If God wanted them to be saved, He'd save them. Clearly, as I'm making money off of them, God wants me to be rich."
Geez, imagine if those guys got to run a whole civilization one day.
Japan clamped down on all that pretty quickly, even before Tokugawa-era self-isolation, and as such, Christianity never got a hold in the mainstream there (though later the handful of Japanese Christian converts had a role to play in establishing western-style universities), unlike in Korea, where American evangelism had a stronger influence.
I have wondered whether some of the difference between Japanese and Korean pop music comes down to this: Japanese pop has largely drawn from jazz and jazz-fusion, which is not strongly tied to Christianity, whereas K-pop has more influences from soul and R&B, genres with roots more immediately in Black American gospel music.
That's an interesting hypothesis I never considered, and I don't know enough about jpop or kpop to have an opinion XD
Little did the Europeans know, Jesus was already there.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-little-known-legend-of-jesus-in-japan-165354242/
Did you ever see Akira Kurosawa's film "Kagemusha"?
As the antagonist shogun heads off for battle, there are catholic priests higher up in his castle, they give him the cross blessing from afar, and he responds with a very Japanese-style salute and a very Japanese yell of - "AMEN!"
That skewed, strange "AMEN!" has always stuck with me.
No, I haven't! I love Kurosawa though, I'll need to catch Kagemusha at some point.
Goddamn Gallows!