日本人のクリスチャン：少数派？

ノースウェスタン大学の先生達はこのブログをお読みになっていますか？

The train was late this morning. This may not seem incredible, but I have been taking the train to the city and back at least six days a week for three months, and it has not been late ONCE. I have a one-hour commute and take the exact same two trains every morning. Anyway, I had no idea what to do, and neither did all the other commuters, but then another one came, after an apology over the intercom.

I think I mentioned this before, but I've been attending a church near my school with one of the other students, Benjamin. My speaking abilities in Japanese aren't stellar, but I am finally at the point where I can listen to a sermon in Japanese and get all the main points. If I'm really paying attention and read the Bible passage in English, I can actually understand the majority of what the 牧師さん is saying.

Because the two of us are せっかく going to church here and wanted to learn more about Japanese religion, our Japanese language teacher recommended we do our final project on Japanese Christianity. So for the past few weeks, we've been giving surveys to the members of the church, and over the Internet to students in the Northwestern and Grinnell InterVarsity chapters. The topic is what characterizes Japanese Christianity as a minority religion (0.7% of the population identify themselves as Christian), and how that compares to American Christianity (roughly 80% of the population).

Given that we only surveyed 60 people, it's horribly unscientific. That being said, the results are really interesting. A few big points:

- The vast majority of the Americans surveyed became Christians by growing up in a Christian family or going to church, whereas a substantial chunk of the Japanese people converted after being invited somewhere or reading the Bible.

- Most Japanese said they had more non-Christian than Christian friends/acquaintances, where it was reversed for the Americans surveyed. However, the disparity wasn't as big as we expected.

- When asked how Christianity made their daily life different, over half of the Americans gave abstract answers (purpose, motivation, etc.), where almost all the Japanese gave concrete differences (not going to shrines, church attendance, not smoking).

- Both were equally likely to consult church/fellowship members in important decisions.

- American Christians almost universally said people have a poor opinion of Christianity because of hypocrisy, poor representatives, and history, where there was a huge spread over how Japanese people thought they were perceived.

For the last point, two people actually used the same answer ("Christianity is a different religion") with two different meanings - the first, the Christianity is different, so it's bad; the second, that it's different from the other minority religions, so it's good.

Edit: Just to be perfectly clear, this project was more to improve our Japanese more than anything else, and because of a lack of resources/time, the sample was heavily biased by age, class, and denomination. So don't base anything off of it!