Japan is a country on the margins of Christianity, a nation in which the missionary flame lit by its first evangelist, St Francis Xavier, for whose faith countless thousands of martyrs were slaughtered, has since sunk to a faint flicker.
Yet 2018 has been a stellar year for Catholics in a country where, at 0.4 per cent of the population, the general experience is one of marginalisation. The announcement by Pope Francis in May that he would elevate the Archbishop of Osaka, Thomas Aquinas Manyo Maeda (inset), to cardinal, was followed by the Unesco World Heritage listing of 12 sites associated with Japan’s persecuted early Christians. In September, Francis announced his intention to visit Japan in 2019.