I had no idea that there are two Trappist monasteries in Japan, and five of female Trappists (Trappistines).
It makes a lot of sense, given Japanese cultural fondness for monks and for doing spiritually strenuous things. But with all the sad resigned things some orders say about how Catholic Japan is sooooo uninfluential, and there’s such a vocation crisis, and really nobody is interested in religion in modern Japan so we have to approach them in other ways, you would think that this TINY LITTLE FACT would get mentioned.
Japan is not all that big a country. Seven frickin’ super-silent monasteries they’ve got. Is this not of interest??? Is this not sufficiently hardcore???
Interesting. I lived in Japan of and on for two years while my ship was stationed there.
Have you seen this blog?
http://catholicinjapan.wordpress.com/
Oooh, the big base? Sasebo? Oki? (actually, not sure if we have ships homeported in Oki….)
I think it could be expanded very easily, IF we had folks go full-out traditional– priests always in the black outfits and collars, nuns always in habits, etc.
There was another article I found and forgot to link to… It was about a fairly old Benedictine monastery in Japan, that never ever had even one native person with a vocation who stuck around. And this monastery had been founded out of Minnesota right after WWII!
It turned out that they decorated the place in an American way, ate American food. and so on. This subtly turned people off. Also, they often shuttled monks back home to America for various reasons. Nobody was there for the rest of their life period, even before Vatican II and all the craziness. There weren’t any monks buried there. So it was sort of the opposite of Benedictine stability, I’d say.
And now that I think of it, there’s a lot of monastic/contemplative orders with houses in Japan that do seem to shuttle people in and out, instead of just assigning them there forever and ever. So that’s another reason.