East Asian Christians?

I visited The Grotto over the weekend. It’s a Catholic sanctuary that features this main altar with the Pietà replica set in a cave. Beautiful, yes (and I’m not religious at all). But it was after I paid the $3.50 to take the elevator to the upper level gardens at the top of the cliff where I found some intriguing surprises.

In a small chapel there was, among others…Asian Christian art. I never took Art History and I promptly slept through just about all of History in Japanese school, so if anyone more knowledgeable wants to educate me a little, please do so. These artwork didn’t have any sort of labels on them telling me what they are.

And then on the garden path was this “Peace Pole”:

This side says “May there be peace among the world’s people” in Japanese. The other sides are in English, Spanish, and Russian.

Curious, I looked up this “Peace Pole” when I got home. Apparently, it’s a project of the World Peace Prayer Society founded in Japan in 1955. According to their website, they have 200,000 of these in 180 countries, all with “May Peace Prevail on Earth” (or a close translation of it, I suppose) in various languages.

Japan’s Catholics number 0.4% of their population (0.75% in China, and of course more in some other Asian countries particularly in historically European-occupied Southeast Asia). Finding material for this blog was the last thing I expected when I went to this Catholic sanctuary on a whim.