This photo taken on November 21, 2016 shows a sculpture of crucified Japanese Christian St. Paulo Miki at the Twenty-Six Martyrs Museum, which commemorates Japanese Christians executed on the site in the late 1500s, in the city of Nagasaki.
Every so often, a group in the town of Ikitsuki, near Nagasaki, meet at a local museum to recite prayers drawn from another time and place. The group, dressed in sober kimonos and sandals, rapidly make the sign of the cross as they sing a mish-mash of Portuguese, Latin and Japanese — evoking the memory of their ancestors, the so-called ‘hidden Christians’, who were brutally persecuted in the 17th century, when Shoguns ruled Japan.
/ AFP / Behrouz MEHRI / TO GO WITH Japan religion history film,FEATURE BY Ursula HYZY (Photo credit should read BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty Images)