Christmas is for the Japanese, rather miserably, a regular working day. This might easily not have been the case. The Japanese were once on the verge of adopting the Christian faith at every strata of society, from peasant to ruler. The English Reformation had a surprisingly significant role in ensuring this didn’t come to pass.

By the eighteenth century, organised Christianity had disappeared from public life

When St Francis Xavier arrived in Japan in 1549, Christianity was entirely unknown there. Within half a century, it had become the fastest-growing religion in the country’s history. By the early seventeenth century, contemporary missionary estimates placed the number of Japanese converts at over one million, from a total population of roughly twelve million. From small beginnings, several powerful daimyō eventually converted, as did samurai. Churches, schools, and seminaries were established. Catechisms and devotional texts were printed in Japanese. By 1613, Jesuits had even translated large extracts from the New Testament and circulated these in Kyoto.

This expansion coincided with Japan’s transition from a period of civil war to one of political consolidation. By the late sixteenth century, Tokugawa Ieyasu was emerging as the dominant power. He was pragmatic, cautious, and intensely concerned with maintaining sovereignty. Foreign influence was tolerated so long as it appeared manageable.

It was at this moment that William Adams arrived. Adams, born in Gillingham in Kent and trained as a pilot in Elizabethan England, reached Japan in 1600 after his Dutch ship was wrecked. He was a member of the Church of England and a product of a society in which anti-Catholicism was institutional rather than merely theological.

Jesuit priests in England were framed as agents of foreign powers; English law treated them as traitors, and official sermons frequently portrayed Catholic missions abroad as........

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