『スターリンの葬送狂騒曲』（スターリンのそうそうきょうそうきょく、The Death of Stalin）は、アーマンド・イアヌッチ（英語版）監督による2017年のイギリス・フランスの歴史・コメディドラマ映画である。1953年の独裁者スターリンの死（英語版）によって引き起こされるソ連内の権力闘争が描かれる。原作はフランスのグラフィックノベル『La mort de Staline』である。
As this coven of vampiric apparatchiks feasts on the remains of Stalinism, the unremitting blackness of the situation at times threatens a full comedy eclipse.
But the discomfiting balancing act of humour and horror is precisely Iannucci’s game — and only he could pull it off with such skill.
Better dead than red? Better red than dead? Unfortunately for Uncle Joe, he is both — creating a gaping power vacuum and the least likely comedy scenario since Life is Beautiful.
The graphic novel that inspired the new Armando Iannucci movie which includes an all-star cast – Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Jason Isaacs, Michael Palin, and Jeffrey Tambor.
Fear, corruption and treachery abound in this political satire set in the aftermath of Stalin's death in the Soviet Union in 1953.
When the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, has a stroke - the political gears begin to turn, plunging the super-state into darkness, uncertainty and near civil war. The struggle for supreme power will determine the fate of the nation and of the world. And it all really happened.
A darkly comic tale about the power vacuum left behind by Stalin's death.
大賞発表のプレスリリースです。今年の大賞は視覚インパクトが大きい、ハリウッド映画っぽいスペクタクルな写真です。こういう写真を見ると当事者が無事なのか知りたくなりますが幸いHe survived the incident with first- and second-degree burns. とあります。
The World Press Photo of the Year honors the photographer whose visual creativity and skills made a picture that captures or represents an event or issue of great journalistic importance in the last year.
The jury, chaired by Magdalena Herrera, awards the prize to Ronaldo Schemidt’s picture entitled ‘Venezuela Crisis’–which also won first prize in the Spot News Single category. The image shows how José Víctor Salazar Balza (28) on fire amid violent clashes with riot police during a protest against President Nicolás Maduro, in Caracas, Venezuela. Salazar was set alight when the gas tank of a motorbike exploded. He survived the incident with first- and second-degree burns. Schemidt (b. 1971) is a staff photographer for Agence France-Presse, based in Mexico.
Magdalena Herrera, director of photography Geo France and chair of the jury, said about selecting the World Press Photo of the Year:
"The photo of the year has to tell an event, that is important enough, it also has to bring questions...it has to engage and has to show a point of view on what happened in the world this year."
She describes the winning photograph:
“It’s a classical photo, but it has an instantaneous energy and dynamic. The colours, the movement, and it’s very well composed, it has strength. I got an instantaneous emotion…”
In recent years, the Japanese macaque, best known as the snow monkey, has become habituated to humans. As the range of the macaque habitat expands from mountain areas to subalpine and lowland regions, the animals have lost their fear, have taken to raiding crops, and are often seen as pests. Despite macaques being officially protected in Japan since 1947, some local laws allow them to be tamed and trained for the entertainment industry. Once considered sacred mediators between gods and humans, monkeys in Japan also came to be seen as representing dislikable humans, deserving of ridicule. Commercial entertainment involving monkeys has existed in Japan for over 1,000 years.
原文ではHistory does not repeatですが、翻訳では「「歴史は繰り返す」と言われますが、そんなことはありません」として、History repeats itselfというフレーズが下敷きとしてあることを明示して訳しています。翻訳したのは大学教授の方ですので、大学生の知識レベルに合わせて補って訳しているのかもしれません。語学教材では原文が透けるように訳すのが良いと考える人もいるみたいですが、伝え方には色々あることも念頭に置きたいです。
To be deceived is equal to suffer from others’ wrongdoings; however, it has never been written in any dictionary that those who are deceived are right.
先ほどの記事でHistory repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce.という言葉がさらりと使われていました。
A White House that is intent on politicizing and falsifying information can achieve its objectives before other branches of government know enough to stop it. From 2002 to 2005, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson was Colin Powell’s chief of staff. He helped prepare the fateful speech to the U.N. Security Council in which Powell argued for the invasion of Iraq, saying, “Unless we act, we are confronting an even more frightening future.” Wilkerson is concerned that the Trump Administration is using “much the same playbook” to heighten a sense of menace around threats posed by Iran. “The talk has been building,” he told me. In December, Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, claimed that there is “undeniable” evidence that Iran has supplied weapons to insurgents in Yemen. The claim was met with skepticism at the U.N., where other member states worry that the U.S. will use that charge to build a case for attacking Iran. “It just brought back the image of Powell holding that alleged anthrax bottle up at the U.N. Security Council,” Wilkerson told me. “It’s some of the same characters as in 2002 and 2003. History repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce.”
マルクスという名前を抜きにしても有名なものですが、ジーニアスの電子版には次のような例文があります。
What's Marx's famous line about history?
He said that history repeats itself, once as tragedy, once as farce.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.
宗教は民衆の阿片である。
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Karl Marx
一匹の妖怪がヨーロッパを徘徊している。共産主義という妖怪が
A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of communism.
万国の労働者は鉄鎖のほかに失う物は何もない。万国の労働者よ、団結せよ 。
The worker of the world has nothing to lose, but their chains, workers of the world unite.
There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.
中国では若者向けのマルクス番組が出ているそうで、その記事タイトルがParticipants Have Nothing to Lose but Their Chainsでした。名句を知っていればクスリとできます。
How the Administration’s loyalists are quietly reshaping American governance.
By Evan Osnos
トランプは何よりもLoyalty（忠誠心）を大事にしていることは以下のようなエピソードからでも伺えます。政治の世界ならまだしも行政組織にもLoyaltyを求めているのです。考えの違う人もあえて取り込もうとしたTeam of Rivalsというオバマの発想が遠い昔の出来事になっています。。。
Republican think tanks and donors succeeded in installing preferred nominees. The earliest wave arrived from the Heritage Foundation; subsequent ones came from Charles and David Koch’s network of conservative advocacy groups and from the American Enterprise Institute. But the White House maintained a virtual blockade against Republicans who had signed letters opposing Trump’s candidacy. “I’ve been asked, ‘Can you recommend somebody for this or that position?’ ” Elliott Abrams, a foreign-affairs official under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, told me. “I’ve come up with the perfect person, and the people I’m talking to at State or Defense say, ‘Oh, my God, she’s great. But she didn’t sign one of the letters, did she?’ ‘Yeah, she did.’ ‘O.K., we’re done here.’ ”
The White House brought in an array of outsiders, who, at times, ran into trouble. As an assistant to the Secretary of Energy, the Administration installed Sid Bowdidge, whose recent employment had included managing a Meineke Car Care branch in Seabrook, New Hampshire. Bowdidge departed after it emerged that he had called Muslims “maggots.” In December, Matthew Spencer Petersen, a nominee to the federal bench, became a brief online sensation when Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, asked him a series of basic law-school questions, which revealed that Petersen had never argued a motion, tried a case, or taken a deposition by himself. Embarrassing details came out about other judicial nominees: Brett Talley, who had never tried a case in federal court, wandered cemeteries hunting for ghosts; Jeff Mateer had called transgender children part of “Satan’s plan.” All three nominations were withdrawn.
In Washington, the tactic of marooning civil servants in obscure assignments is known as sending them to the “turkey farm.” The turkey farms are reminiscent of the “rubber rooms” of New York City. Until the practice was banned, in 2010, the city’s Department of Education exiled hundreds of troublesome teachers to reassignment centers, where they idled, sometimes for years, reading newspapers and dozing. An Asia specialist assigned to the turkey farm likened the experience to a Japanese tradition in which unwanted workers are relegated to a “banishment room,” to encourage them to resign out of boredom and shame. Another turkey-farm inhabitant, who has held senior intelligence and national-security posts, told me that he joined the government during the Reagan Administration and never conceived of himself as an opponent of Trump. “I’m a Reagan holdover,” he said, shaking his head in bewilderment. “I sometimes don’t go in before ten, and then leave before five. You just float.” (Asked about the complaints, the spokesperson said that the State Department is “continuing to highly value career employees.”)
A banishment room (also known as a chasing-out-room and a boredom room) is a modern employee exit management strategy whereby employees are transferred to another department where they are assigned meaningless work until they become disheartened enough to quit.[1][2][3] Since the resignation is voluntary, the employee would not be eligible for certain benefits. The legality and ethicality of the practice is questionable and may be construed as constructive dismissal in some regions.
The practice, which is not officially acknowledged, is common in Japan which has strong labor laws and a tradition of permanent employment.
By Rochelle Kopp, Managing Principal, Japan Intercultural Consulting
In the United States, the concept of “at will employment” means that employees can quit their jobs whenever they would like, and that companies can fire employees whenever they would like. In a sense, it’s the opposite of Japan’s lifetime employment custom. As any American employee who has experienced being fired can attest, it’s certainly not pleasant and can lead to depression and many other problems. And indeed in the U.S. there are many people who have lost their jobs and cannot find new ones, and become the “long-term unemployed.” But the ability to hire and fire as needed is one of the underpinnings of the U.S. economy’s flexibility, and is something that companies count on in order to remain competitive.
Of course, when it comes to firing even in the United States it’s not always wise for a company to fire people simply whenever it wants to. To avoid legal problems it behooves a company to document the economic need for layoffs or the problems with the performance of an individual employee being let go. But still, letting people go is something relatively straightforward for American firms, and the culture in general supports it.
In contrast, Japanese companies are barred both by societal and legal constraints that make it very difficult to fire employees. Historically, that led to the phenomenon of the madogiwazoku – literally, the tribe that sits by the windows. Employees whose services were no longer needed, but that the company could not or did not want to fire, would be given a pleasant spot by the window to while away working hours by reading the newspaper. However, as the Japanese economy has had to deal with years upon years of recession, and the increasingly stiff winds of global competition, many Japanese companies are finding themselves with more redundant staff than could fit at the window seats. This is particularly true for many companies in Japan’s electronics industry, which is having a lot of difficulty these days and feels the need to shed many employees who were hired during the boom years.
Sony, Mr. Tani’s employer of 32 years, consigned him to this room because they can’t get rid of him. Sony had eliminated his position at the Sony Sendai Technology Center, which in better times produced magnetic tapes for videos and cassettes. But Mr. Tani, 51, refused to take an early retirement offer from Sony in late 2010 — his prerogative under Japanese labor law.
So there he sits in what is called the “chasing-out room.” He spends his days there, with about 40 other holdouts.
“I won’t leave,” Mr. Tani said. “Companies aren’t supposed to act this way. It’s inhumane.”
The standoff between workers and management at the Sendai factory underscores an intensifying battle over hiring and firing practices in Japan, where lifetime employment has long been the norm and where large-scale layoffs remain a social taboo, at least at Japan’s largest corporations.
トランプがアメリカ政治・行政に与えるダメージというのは思った以上に根深いものになっていることがこのあたりの危機感がMichiko KakutaniにThe Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trumpを、Stephen GreenblattにTyrant: Shakespeare On Powerという本を出させている気がします。
In the United States, politics are exciting and bureaucracy is boring. In China, the opposite is true. As a senior official once explained to me, “The bureaucracy is political, and politics are bureaucratized.” In the Chinese communist regime, there is no separation between political power and public administration. Understanding Chinese politics, therefore, requires first and foremost an appreciation of China’s bureaucracy. That bureaucracy is composed of two vertical hierarchies—the party and the state—replicated across the five levels of government: central, provincial, county, city, and township. These crisscrossing lines of authority produce what the China scholar Kenneth Lieberthal has termed a “matrix” structure. In formal organizational charts, the party and the state are separate entities, with Xi leading the party and Premier Li Keqiang heading up the administration and its ministries. In practice, however, the two are intertwined. The premier is also a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the party’s top body, which currently has seven members. And at the local level, officials often simultaneously hold positions in both hierarchies. For example, a mayor, who heads the administration of a municipality, is usually also the municipality’s deputy chief of party. Moreover, officials frequently move between the party and the state. For instance, mayors may become party secretaries and vice versa.
Acclaimed writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reflects on a childhood surrounded by malaria
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE
Wednesday 25 April 2018 13:04
PART 1
I was about ten years old. My mother had brought me to the medical center on the campus of the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, where I grew up. As we sat waiting for the doctor, people stopped to say hello to my mother. The campus was a small community and everyone knew everyone else. Each person who greeted my mother would then turn to me and say, “Ndo, sorry for your malaria.’
As we sat waiting for the doctor, people stopped to say hello to my mother.（医者を待つ間座っていると人々は立ち止まって母に挨拶をした）とstop to不定詞が使われているこの文章も英語構文好きが喜びますね。
Each time I had malaria, I didn’t go to school. Once, in Class 2, at the age of 13, I had a very bad case of malaria that made me miss a whole week of school. My friends came to visit bearing cards, as though on pilgrimage, and when I finally went back to school, I felt left out, bereft, because so much had passed me by. It was during that week that quadratic equations were covered in mathematics class. I missed it all. And I have, since then, never been able to make sense of quadratic equations. So perhaps the only good thing I can say for malaria is that I can’t be held responsible for my poor grasp of mathematics. It’s all malaria’s fault.
Since I started my second career almost 20 years ago, I've seen a lot more suffering than I ever planned on. It's haunting. It's also motivating. It reminds me exactly why the work we're doing together is so important and so urgent.
One of the worst things I've ever seen, years ago in Tanzania, is a child having seizures from cerebral malaria. I didn't know if he would survive. I did know that, even if he did, his brain development would be impaired.
アディーチェのスピーチ原稿
Ekumeku was a bright, funny girl, two years older than me. She was pretty and popular and she had a skill that we children considered very exotic: she could crochet, she would hold a crochet needle and a ball of wool in her hands and before you knew it, a hat or a shawl had materialized. One day she fell sick. It was, of course, malaria. She took chloroquin tablets. Two days later she was shaking in bed. She had seizures, her skin so hot it almost burned and her eyes looked blank and she was delirious. She was talking, sentences running into one another, but nothing she said made any sense.
She was taken to hospital. She missed school for weeks. When finally she returned to school, we could tell that something was desperately wrong; her eyes were glazed, and it seemed as if a different person had inhabited her body. We were told that she had cerebral malaria. That the malaria had got to her brain. It changed her life forever. Today, I often think of her and wonder whether she can still crochet.
The great news is that, unlike 15 years ago, when we were emerging from decades of stagnation, the innovation pipeline is producing results—in prevention, detection, and treatment.
First, prevention.
The IVCC here in the UK has partnered with crop protection companies to develop new insecticides. We finally have enough new IRS agents to set up a rotation to slow the development resistance.
共同声明に賛同した5社は、ビル＆メリンダ・ゲイツ財団※1（所在地：米国シアトル、CEO：Sue Desmond-Hellmann。以下、ゲイツ財団）とInnovative Vector Control Consortium※2（所在地：英国リバプール、CEO：Nick Hamon。以下、IVCC）の支援を得た取り組みとして、2040年までにマラリア被害ゼロを目指す「ZERO by 40」を掲げました。既存薬剤に対して抵抗性を示すマラリア媒介蚊の増加が問題になる中、5社の持つ専門知識や化学技術を駆使し、薬剤抵抗性蚊にも効果的なソリューションを開発、供給することで、マラリア撲滅の取り組みを推進します。ゲイツ財団及びIVCCと5社の取り組みは、これまでもマラリア対策技術開発、実用化において様々な成果を上げてきましたが、今後は今まで以上に連携を強化していきます。
Nearly a quarter of the world’s population remains unbanked. But mobile phones are helping to change that, writes Simon Long
Since its inception in the Philippines in 2000 and its take-off in Sub-Saharan Africa more than a decade ago, “mobile money”—the transfer of cash by phone—has become a global phenomenon, welcomed and encouraged by governments and international organisations. In 2010 the G20 group of countries came up with a set of “Principles for Innovative Financial Inclusion”. In 2012 the World Bank, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, produced the first “Findex”, or financial-inclusion index, an ambitious attempt to measure the scale of the problem and track efforts to tackle it.
This special report will look at some of the fruits of those efforts. It appears at a relatively optimistic time, when the ranks of the financially excluded are thinning fast and there are strong hopes that the process will accelerate further. One reason is the growth in mobile-phone and internet penetration, making finance accessible even to those living a long way from physical bank branches or ATMs. According to the Findex, 78% of the world’s unbanked adults receiving wages in cash have a mobile phone. Moreover, the “unbanked” are seen as an increasingly attractive commercial market. Firms as diverse as Ant Financial, an affiliate of Alibaba, China’s e-commerce behemoth, and PayPal, a Silicon Valley payments firm, make much of their role in expanding financial inclusion. Daniel Schulman, PayPal’s chief executive, says his company’s mission is “to democratise financial services”.
OUR GOAL: To help people in the world’s poorest regions improve their lives and build sustainable futures by connecting them with digitally-based financial tools and services.
the Financial Inclusion Action Plan, the Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion and a flexible SME Finance Framework, all of which will significantly contribute to improving access to financial services and expanding opportunities for poor households and small and medium enterprises.
世界銀行グループの研究機関CGAP（Consultative Group to Assist the Poor）では、金融サービスへのアクセスの提供によって貧困層の生活を改善することに取り組んでいます。そこでは金融包摂を「すべての人々が、経済活動のチャンスを捉えるため、また経済的に不安定な状況を軽減するために必要とされる金融サービスにアクセスでき、またそれを利用できる状況」と定義しています。
Part of the problem is that microfinance is very hard to provide on a large scale. Reaching, assessing and helping borrowers like Ms Parveen is time-consuming and labour-intensive, which makes it hard to keep interest rates at a reasonable level. Typical annualised percentage interest rates are in the region of 20-40%, cheaper than the traditional local moneylender or pawnbroker but hardly a snip. Digital money holds out the hope of improving things in two ways: by making it cheaper and faster to grant, disburse and repay loans and to provide other financial services, notably savings and insurance; and by harvesting data that should widen access to financial services for those with little or no history in the formal financial sector.
In Kenya, for example, Safaricom in 2012 launched M-Shwari, a paperless bank account offered by the Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA) via M-PESA. CBA takes the risk but can use the know-your-customer checks already done digitally by M-PESA to open the account, and the M-PESA payment history to gauge creditworthiness. Like M-PESA itself, it has grown like Topsy (CBA’s customer base increased from 50,000 in 2010 to 22m today) and has been much imitated across Africa and beyond. In Pakistan, FINCA, the global microfinance network, wants to use SimSim, its new mobile-money account, to offer “nano loans” (the equivalent of $5 or $10, say), thereby establishing a data trail for assessing bigger loans later.
今週のアジア版TIMEのカバーストーリーは強権的な政権を扱ったRise of the Strongmanですがそれほどページ数はありません。むしろFBIの記事の方が充実しています。現にUS版ではこちらがカバーストーリー。アジア版だとFBIが表紙よりはこちらの方がアピールすると考えたのでしょうか。記事最後を紹介してしまうのでこれから読みたい方は読み飛ばしてください。
Perhaps the most worrying element of the strongman’s rise is the message it sends. The systems that powered the Cold War’s winners now look much less appealing than they did a generation ago. Why emulate the U.S. or European political systems, with all the checks and balances that prevent even the most determined leaders from taking on chronic problems, when one determined leader can offer a credible shortcut to greater security and national pride? As long as that rings true, the greatest threat may be the strongmen yet to come.
Taking the material foundations of democratic hegemony seriously casts the story of democracy’s greatest successes in a different light, and it also changes how one thinks about its current crisis. As liberal democracies have become worse at improving their citizens’ living standards, populist movements that disavow liberalism are emerging from Brussels to Brasília and from Warsaw to Washington. A striking number of citizens have started to ascribe less importance to living in a democracy: whereas two-thirds of Americans above the age of 65 say it is absolutely important to them to live in a democracy, for example, less than one-third of those below the age of 35 say the same thing. A growing minority is even open to authoritarian alternatives: from 1995 to 2017, the share of French, Germans, and Italians who favored military rule more than tripled.
******
New forms of authoritarian capitalism may eventually suffer similar types of economic stagnation. So far, however, the form of authoritarian capitalism that has emerged in Arab Gulf states and East Asia—combining a strong state with relatively free markets and reasonably secure property rights—is having a good run. Of the 15 countries in the world with the highest per capita incomes, almost two-thirds are nondemocracies. Even comparatively unsuccessful authoritarian states, such as Iran, Kazakhstan, and Russia, can boast per capita incomes above $20,000. China, whose per capita income was vastly lower as recently as two decades ago, is rapidly starting to catch up. Although average incomes in its rural hinterlands remain low, the country has proved that it can offer a higher level of wealth in its more urban areas: the coastal region of China now comprises some 420 million people, with an average income of $23,000 and growing. In other words, hundreds of millions of people can now be said to live under conditions of “authoritarian modernity.” In the eyes of their less affluent imitators around the world, their remarkable prosperity serves as a testament to the fact that the road to prosperity no longer needs to run through liberal democracy.
今回のTIMEの記事はIan Bremmer本人による著書Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalismのプロモーションも兼ねてのものでしょう。Us vs. Themという思考法を生み出している現状を分析しているようです。IntroductionではIan Bremmer本人がボストンの貧しい地域から勤勉さで今の地位に登り詰めた過去を語っています。そのような「アメリカンドリーム」が今のアメリカでは叶えられなくなっている、トランプ支持に傾くのも仕方がない状況になっているというのです。
We can attack these populists, mock them, or dismiss them, but they know something important about the people they’re talking to, and they understand that many people believe that “globalism” and “globalization” have failed them. These would‑be leaders have a talent for drawing boundaries between people. They offer a compelling vision of division, of “us vs. them,” of the worthy citizen fighting for his rights against the entitled or grasping thief. Depending on the country and the moment, “them” may mean rich people or poor people, foreigners or religious, racial, and ethnic minorities. It can mean supporters of a rival political party or people who live in a different part of the country. It can mean politicians, bankers, or reporters. However applied, it’s a tried- and- true political tool.
Us vs. Them is not about the rocks or the damage they do on impact. Rocks are expressions of frustration. They don’t solve problems. Instead, we must look more closely at the deeper sources of these frustrations, at how governments around the world are likely to respond to them, and how political leaders, institutions, companies, schools, and citizens can work together to make things better.
The United States is passing through something similar today. The information revolution is disrupting the country’s social and economic order as profoundly as the Industrial Revolution did. The ideologies and policies that fit American society a generation ago are becoming steadily less applicable to the problems it faces today. The United States’ political parties and most of its political leaders lack the vision and ideas that could solve its most urgent problems. Intellectual and policy elites, for the most part, are too wedded to paradigms that no longer work, but the populists who seek to replace them don’t have real answers, either. It is, in many ways, a stressful and anxious time to be alive. And that anxiety has prompted a pervasive sense of despair about American democracy—a fear that it has reached a point of dysfunction and decay from which it will never recover.
The effects of rapid change are often unwelcome, but the process of transformation is one of growth and development, not of decline and fall. Indeed, the ability to cope with change remains one of the United States’ greatest sources of strength. In the nineteenth century, people often compared the United States unfavorably with the orderly Prussian-led German empire. Today, the contrast often drawn is with China’s efficient modernization. Yet there is resilience and flexibility in the creative disorder of a free society. There are reasons to believe that, once again, the United States can find a path to an open and humane society that capitalizes on the riches that the new economy will produce.
TOKYO (Kyodo) -- A UNESCO preliminary review panel has recommended a dozen sites linked to the history of Japan's persecuted Christians in its southwest for registration on the world's cultural heritage list, the government said Friday.
（中略）
The other locations include the village of Sakitsu in Amakusa, Kumamoto Prefecture, where Christians practiced their faith in secret despite persecution for most of the Edo Period (1603-1868) under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate.
An advisory panel to the United Nations' cultural agency has recommended that places linked to the history of Japan's persecuted Christians be granted World Heritage status.
（中略）
The International Council on Monuments and Sites gave the highest rating out of its 4-level recommendation scale to the nominated property "Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region."
（中略）
They include "Remains of Hara Castle," "Oura Cathedral," and villages where people secretly practiced Christianity despite a ban on the faith from the 17th to 19th centuries.
Kakure Kirishitan (Japanese: 隠れキリシタン, lit. '"hidden Christian"') is a modern term for a member of the Japanese Catholic Church during the Edo period that went underground after the Shimabara Rebellion in the 1630s.
Underground Christians kept the faith in Japan during 300 years of often brutal persecution – but their story is barely known in the Western world.
Now the 'Hidden Christians' are being recognised in an exhibition showcasing the moving story of Christians who remained true to their faith without priests, seminaries or churches.
Persecuted by the shogun, they still worship a "closetgod"
On the picturesque Japanese island of Ikitsuki, where the ways of farmers and fishermen die hard, two old men squat before a home altar and chant prayers carefully entrusted to them by their ancestors. The ritual is intense and moving. But something is askew. The rite is partly Buddhist, partly Christian. The language sounds odd, a sort of pidgin Latin. And what do the ancient prayers mean? One of the worshipers admits, "I don't understand a word of this."
Neither does anyone else. The men at prayer are among 10,000 surviving Kakure Kirishitan (crypto-Christians)—members of a fossilized faith that is unique in church annals. The poignant tale of the sect begins in 1549, when Jesuit Missionary Francis Xavier brought Roman Catholicism to Japan. The new creed soon gathered 300,000 followers, including most of the inhabitants of Ikitsuki, but its success also spelled its doom. Fearing the Christians' growth and foreign links, the warlord ruler Hideyoshi and later shogun mounted terror campaigns in which tens of thousands perished, often gruesomely. Christianity was all but stamped out.
