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Northwestern Kyushu is the most notable region in Japan for its dense distribution of former Hidden Christians. The spatial structures of its religious organizations have been classified into several types. However, this classification procedure and the formation principles of such organizations need further examination. This article reexamines the spatial structures of these organizations and their formation principles from a social geographical perspective, focusing on three villages on Hirado Island and comparing them with Ikitsuki Island, Nagasaki Prefecture. We reveal the basic units and subunits that constitute one or two components of the organizations in the case study villages on Hirado as compared with the three components, including alliance units, found on Ikitsuki. Within the same region, different structural patterns were observed among the villages, each subject to their own geographical conditions, such as physical environment, settlement morphological pattern, and population size, as well as existing neighborhood relationships or kinships and the administrative units within and over the village.
KEYWORDS: Hidden Christians-confrere group-Japanese village community-social geography-Hirado and Ikitsuki Islands-Gotō Islands
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The beliefs of Hidden Christians in northwestern Kyushu are a principal component of Japanese religions that acculturated as a result of the encounters between Japanese folk religious elements and foreign religions (Hori 1968, 15-16).1 After the withdrawal and eradication of European and Japanese Christian missionaries in early seventeenth-century Japan, Hidden Christians in rural areas preserved their religion, without any priests, by sustaining secret lay organizations within village communities and conducting various rituals themselves, adapted into the Japanese Shinto style (Miyazaki 2014, 54-128). However, most of these organizations had dissolved by the late twentieth century (Miyazaki 2014, 218).
Generally, from a religious studies perspective, the Hidden Christian communities in Nagasaki Prefecture are classified into either the Hirado-Ikitsuki ... type or the Sotome-Gotō-Nagasaki ... type (Tagita 1954, 7-8; Kataoka 1967, 102-12) (figure 1). Nakazono (2015, 18) revised these names into the Ikitsuki-Hirado ... type and the Sotome-Urakami ...・ ... (including the Gotō Islands) type.2 He distinguished the two types more clearly by focusing on the managing organizations, sacred items, religious sites and rituals, and historical backgrounds during the periods of missionary and Christian prohibition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Nakazono 2012, 4-12) . Based primarily on a detailed report of...