Japanese Catholic Naming Customs

I’ve long been interested in the Japanese Catholic Church — we love St. Francis Xavier in my family (and the CCC movie Francis Xavier and the Samurai’s Lost Treasure is a favorite), and this bit from The Catholic Encyclopedia at New Advent is amazing and so moving:

“There is not in the whole history of the Church a single people who can offer to the admiration of the Christian world annals as glorious, and a martyrology as lengthy, as those of the people of Japan.”

Indeed there are huge lists of Venerables, Blesseds, and Saints who were born in Japan and died in Japan and — being that I’m always looking through the lens of Catholic names — I’ve always been interested by the fact that every single one of them has a familiar saint’s name for a first name. I know there are Japanese Catholics with Japanese names (like the aforementioned Shusaku Endo; I did actually look to see if he also had a Christian name but didn’t find one), so I’ve wondered how the idea of “Christian names” fits into the naming traditions of Japanese Catholics. Click here to read the rest at Catholic Mom.