Bulletin > Volume 50 Hidden Altars: Dialogue as Lived Infrastructure among Japan’s Kakure Kirishitan

Munsi, Roger Vanzila

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This article examines the ritual life of contemporary Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians) in Japan to reconsider how anthropology conceptualizes interreligious dialogue. Drawing on more than two decades of ethnographic engagement with Kakure Kirishitan communities, including focused research conducted between 2012 and 2025, it argues that religious plurality in this context is sustained less through discursive exchange or doctrinal negotiation than through embodied ritual coordination. Catholic-inflected prayers (orasho), Buddhist memorial practices, and local domestic and shrine-related spatial practices are brought together within a practical repertoire shaped by histories of persecution, concealment, and adaptation. Attending to ritual timing, bodily discipline, spatial arrangements, and material objects, the article shows how these practices are reproduced without requiring participants to reconcile their different religious histories or meanings. What may appear externally as hybridity or syncretism is approached ethnographically as a historically situated process of practical coordination. The article proposes “dialogue as lived infrastructure” to describe the repeated, embodied adjustments through which practitioners sustain relationships across religious difference, even when the meaning of those relationships remain partially articulated. Rather than replacing discursive approaches to dialogue, this concept draws attention to the practical and relational work through which plurality remains possible in everyday religious life.