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Tokugawa Ieyasu banned it in 1614 for one. You would be killed for being a practicing Christian up until the Meiji restoration. Think about it like this. You've got Europeans coming in. They are seen as a direct threat[1] to your power base built on the divine authority of the God Emperor and the Shogun, his personal representative. The Buddhists don't claim ...

One point to mention is that Christianity does not mix well with other religions as Noldorin notes, basically you are a Christian and that is it. Buddhism is more of a philosophy than religion (my view considering my wife's Buddhist faith) and while they pray to Buddha it's more of an ideal to shoot for, how you do that can be open to interpretation. If ...

From The Samurai and the Sacred (pp. 110-111), the critical moment that went against Christianity appears to have been the San Felipe incident, which culminated in the martyrdom of the Twenty-Six Saints of Japan (emphasis added): In October 1596 the San Felipe was wrecked off he coast of Shikoku. Hideyoshi ordered that the cargo should be confiscated, ...

Protestants didn't have an interest in proselytism, and they were allowed to trade freely. The Spaniards, on the other hand, were trying to invade Japan through religion. Converting to Catholicism allowed one access to gunpowder, and thus, some Daimyos forced their people into conversion in order to gain a strategic advantage. From a religious point of ...

Remember that Christianity entered Japan quite late, in the 1500s to early 1600s. Mostly, initially, by Catholic Portuguese. At the time there was a split in Christianity in Europe, from Catholic & Prodestants. So the Catholics (at the time) were much more strict about the interpretation of their religion, and the Catholic Church is quite a hierarchial ...

The Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English reached Japan during the 1500s. And many Jesuit priests were sent there to spread Catholic doctrine. The two historically most important things they imported to Japan were gunpowder and Christianity, in the form of Roman Catholicism. —Wikipedia The Japanese daimyo on Kyūshū welcomed foreign trade because of ...