In ancient times, many tombs of Dionysus and even Zeus could be found throughout Hellas. And they were all "official". After all, if a deity died in one place, why shouldn't he die in another. What does he feel sorry for? Likewise, there are more than a dozen “official” foreskins of Christ in Catholic reliquaries, which until then did not bother anyone. This is an archaic logic coming from animism. Knowing about it, it is easy to accept the belief of Japanese Christians that Jesus is buried in their land. And in general, according to their version, he was not crucified: he simply decided to become an ordinary Japanese farmer and started an ordinary Japanese family.
When the Portuguese Jesuits began to convert the shogun's subjects to Christianity, they were in for a pleasant surprise: the Japanese converted to the new faith quickly and without much resistance. Religious plasticity inherent in their mentality affected. She threw a lot of problems to the Jesuits: many of the converts did not understand why they now have to pray only to a foreign God - after all, the Buddha did not become worse from this, and Amaterasu did not go anywhere.
Still "dull" Japanese quickly began to engage in myth-making, inventing their own stories about Jesus, which made the Jesuits clutch their heads. The pinnacle of this delightful and naive creative act was the legend that the son of God, in fact, grew garlic in the north of Japan, left descendants here, lived to be a hundred years old and left behind a grave in the village of Shingu. The grave became a place of pilgrimage and still exists today.
This happened during the so-called "lost years of Jesus" - the unaccounted for 12 years of Christ's life, which are not covered in any way in the New Testament. Over the years, he went from student to master, found Enlightenment at Mount Fuji and returned to his homeland, Judea. Further in this myth, everything goes according to the Bible, but here too there is a grandiose twist: in fact, the Romans mistakenly crucified not Christ, but his younger brother named Isukiri.
Tomb of Jesus in Singu.
Disappointed in the West - still, he was almost killed there! - Jesus returned to the blessed Land of the Rising Sun, where he lived doing simple and honest work - growing rice and garlic. And so that the vengeful Romans did not get to him, Christ changed his name to Daiteku Taro Jirai and settled in the north of Japan, in the village of Shingu. He married the daughter of a local farmer, whose name was Miyuko, had three daughters with her, and lived to the venerable 106 years. The locals laughed at his appearance and called him a "long-nosed goblin", but he certainly did not take offense.
Pay attention to how many pseudo-authentic and even deliberately funny details are in this legend! Elderly Jesus, from whom he smells of garlic, who is called names by the neighbors' boys, and he still has no luck with his sons - such a person certainly understands the aspirations of ordinary people.
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The sources of this story are as wonderful as herself. First, these are, of course, local legends. Apparently, a child with blue eyes was once born in the Shingo area, and, together with the advent of Christianity that happened around the same time, this was enough for the birth of a myth. He gained national fame thanks to the famous hoax, the so-called "Takenuchi Manuscript" - a collection of ancient mystical documents allegedly found in the 1930s, which describes the "true" history of ancient times.
Shinto rituals are held at the grave of Jesus.
During World War II, the manuscript was allegedly lost, but restored by the forces of "patriots". As you might have guessed, these active "patriots" can hardly be called credible individuals. One of them is Wado Kosaka, a cosmoarchaeologist, ufologist and a fan of conspiracy theories, who in the 70s appeared on Japanese television more than once on approximately the same rights as the more familiar to us native believers and "awakened". But I don’t want to focus on media madmen; we’d better return to Jesus.
The tomb of Jesus is located in the territory belonging to the Savaguchi family from the village of Shingu. And the local Shinto residents, clearly not burdened with skepticism, in the old days considered representatives of this family to be the descendants of Jesus. This was especially facilitated by the fact that some of them really had blue eyes and an unusual appearance for these places. In a sense, this is the wisdom of paganism: “Oh, are you descendants of God? Great, we, by the way, too, but different! . Yes, and having a deity's grave on your land as a landmark is very useful. For the village of Xingu, this generates good tourist income every year.
Apparently, to make this strange story even crazier, in 2004 the Israeli ambassador to Japan Eli Cohen came to the village of Shingo and opened a memorial stone on the grave of Jesus. And neither side had any particular dissonance. True, the Israeli embassy nevertheless clarified that this is only a friendly act, and they do not support Japan's claims to possession of the true grave of Christ.
Memorial stone at the grave of Jesus.
Author: Vladimir Brovin
