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The Authenticity of the Hidden Christians' Villages in Nagasaki: Issues in Evaluation of Cultural Landscapes

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The Authenticity of the Hidden Christians' Villages in Nagasaki: Issues in Evaluation of Cultural Landscapes sustainability Article The Authenticity of the Hidden Christians’ Villages in Nagasaki: Issues in Evaluation of Cultural Landscapes Tinka Delakorda Kawashima Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University, 1-1-1 Kagamiyama, Higashi-Hiroshima, Hiroshima 739-8524, Japan; [email protected]; Tel.: +81-82-424-6705 Abstract: Located in the north-western part of Kyushu, “Hidden Christians Sites in the Nagasaki Region” were designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2018. This serial property consists of twelve sites, including the Christian villages that bear unique testimony to a cultural tradition nurtured under a long period of religious prohibition. Based on fieldwork research at Kirishitan villages in Hirado City, this paper shows how the global conservation strategies affect the local people and the sustainability of their cultural tradition. Comparing UNESCO and Japanese cultural landscape protection policies, I argue that the evaluation and selection of sites that begin at the local authorities and stakeholders’ level, is eventually reduced to tangible properties ready-made for tourist consumption. Here, the evaluation subsides under the UNESCO authenticity criteria and narrow governmental interests towards the cultural tradition it is supposed to protect. Therefore, for the protection of cultural landscapes and the living traditions, the decisions by cultural heritage protection authorities should be carefully made, based on scientific research of a cultural tradition, and in the interest of the tradition’s living successors. Keywords: cultural landscape; authenticity; intangible heritage; cultural tradition; Hidden Christians; Citation: Delakorda Kawashima, T. Senpuku Kirishitan; Kakure Kirishitan; Japan The Authenticity of the Hidden Christians’ Villages in Nagasaki: Issues in Evaluation of Cultural Landscapes. Sustainability 2021, 13, 1. Introduction 4387. https://doi.org/10.3390/ Compared to many other places around the world known for Christian persecution, su13084387 the Japanese case is unique in that despite the cruelty of the persecution, which included the closure of the country and the expulsion of all foreigners, the Japanese Christians Academic Editor: Francesca Di Turo maintained their faith underground for more than two hundred years without the help of missionaries. The will to preserve the faith was so strong that it continued after the Received: 21 February 2021 ban was lifted. This is most notable in the Nagasaki area, on Ikitsuki Island in particular, Accepted: 4 April 2021 Published: 14 April 2021 where communities of the so-called Kakure Kirishitan (the Hidden Christians) have, until today, handed down rituals and prayers combining Latin, Portuguese, and Japanese Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral words. Researchers from Japan and elsewhere have cautioned since the 1950s to record with regard to jurisdictional claims in this remarkable heritage. This was finally addressed when Japan decided to nominate the published maps and institutional affil- “Churches and Christian sites in Nagasaki” for the World Heritage Site. iations. This article discusses the nomination process and investigates primary and sec- ondary UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and Japan Agency for Cultural Affairs (ACA) sources to show reasons for excluding the Kakure Kirishitan from Japan’s nomination of the “Hidden Christian Sites in Nagasaki re- gion” for WHS. Some authors have already pointed out the “unfairness” of the nomination, Copyright: © 2021 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. which “erased faith” from Japan’s history [1]. Based on an analysis of the prefectural gov- This article is an open access article ernment’s actions, the Catholic Church of Nagasaki, and tourist associations, Yamanaka [2] distributed under the terms and claims the Catholic Church and Prefecture’s interests dominated the nomination process conditions of the Creative Commons from the very beginning. In the heritage-making process, the Catholic Church tended Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// towards re-establishing its long history in Japan, thus focusing on numerous churches built creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ during the persecution era [2]. Previous research focused on commodification of Churches 4.0/). and Christian sites as tourism resources [3], sharing Christian heritage as an honourable Sustainability 2021, 13, 4387. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13084387 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability Sustainability 2021, 13, 4387 2 of 22 identity [3,4], the issues of separating churches and sites from their local religious to re- gional historic heritage context and commodification of rural spaces in Nagasaki [5], and consuming religion as culture [2,4,5]. However, my intention in this study is not to address the tourism interests and the motives of the Catholic Church in the process, but the official global and local criteria by which the value of the Hidden Christians’ villages was determined. The study contributes to previous research by providing a detailed analysis and discussion of criteria applied in evaluations of heritage. With this, it intends to identify the weak points in the currently existing official criteria of the International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and ACA Cultural Property Protection Acts and suggest additional precautions when dealing with so-called “difficult heritage”. Christian villages were evaluated and selected using authenticity and integrity criteria in the category of cultural landscape. The concept of cultural landscape, focusing on the outstanding interaction between people and their environment, was recognised in the 1992 UNESCO World Heritage Convention. UNESCO is the first international legal instrument to protect cultural landscapes in times of rapid demolishing of natural habitats. Cultural landscapes represent the “combined works of nature and of man”, as designated in Article 1 of the Convention [6]. Cultural landscapes “are a symbol of the growing recognition of the fundamental links between local communities and their heritage, humankind and its natural environment” [7]. The current Operational Guidelines for the World Heritage Convention propose that cultural landscapes reflect techniques of sustainable land-use, and a specific spiritual relation to nature [8]. Hence, the protection of cultural landscapes can contribute to modern sustainable land-use techniques and can maintain or enhance natural values in the landscape. The continued existence of traditional forms of land-use also supports biological diversity in many regions of the world. Therefore, the protection of traditional cultural landscapes helps maintain biological diversity [8]. The concept of authenticity, as the transmitter of the values and significance of cultural landscape, together with the concept of integrity, has played a significant role in the process of registration, conservation, and management of cultural landscapes [9]. Authenticity was first used as the initial criterion for assessment of property in the World Heritage List [10], while the ICOMOS Committee [11] had introduced the measure of integrity as a key criterion for registration. Obtaining the integrity criterion and preserving it are considered the purposes of heritage conservation and management [9]. The more the measure of authenticity is capable of transmitting values and significance of the heritage, and the stronger the measure of integrity for maintaining them over time, the more likely a property will last. In this paper, I examine how these concepts are defined in UNESCO, ICOMOS, and ACA documents, and how they were applied within the heritage-making/nomination process. Based on a case study of the World Heritage Site “Hidden Christian sites in Nagasaki region”, I analyse and compare UNESCO and ACA selection criteria and show their perspectives on the sites and tradition. The results show that they differ significantly in the aspect of the intangible living community. The analysis of documents and interviews with local officials illustrates that despite Japan’s proclaimed high value [12,13] of the intangible and living heritage, in practice, the state party selected “unchanged”, historic, tangible, and easy-to-manage sites to maximise their potential for inscription on the World Heritage List (WHL). 2. Conceptual Framework Three concepts informed the data analysis in this study: Cultural landscape, authen- ticity, and integrity. As the definitions and conceptualizations of these three concepts have changed over time and show cultural differences, this section looks at how they are defined by the main authorities (UNESCO and ACA) involved in the nomination process. Sustainability 2021, 13, 4387 3 of 22 Clarifying this will help us understand how the different perspectives of cultural land- scapes and of their maintenance affect the selection of candidates and how the authorities negotiate a common understanding in preparing the nomination dossier. 2.1. The Concept of Cultural Landscape in UNESCO Based on case studies of World Heritage cultural landscapes from all regions of the world, Rössler highlights the novelties in the UNESCO Convention’s implementation through the landscape approach [7]. The most evident results of the landscape approach are the shift from exceptional natural sites and national parks without people to designated natural heritage sites in a landscape with people and communities [7]. This shift motivated
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