Grave of Jesus Christ

Two grass mounds on a hillside in Shingo, each with a wooden cross, and a sign saying that one holds Jesus Christ and the other holds his brother's ear and a lock of his mother's hair.

The story comes from the Takenouchi documents, produced in 1935 by a man named Takenouchi Kiyomaro who said they were ancient family records. According to them, Jesus first came to Japan at 21, studied for twelve years, went back to Judea, and was not crucified: his younger brother Isukiri took his place, and Jesus fled across Siberia to northern Japan, where he farmed rice, married a woman called Miyuko, had three daughters, and died at 106.

There is no evidence for any of this. The documents are generally regarded as forgeries and the originals were conveniently destroyed in the war. The village does not really argue otherwise; the museum beside the graves presents it as a legend and sells Christ-branded souvenirs without embarrassment.

What makes the visit worth an hour is watching a community handle a strange inheritance. Local customs get cited as evidence in the displays: a folk song called Nanyadoyara whose words nobody can translate, an old habit of marking a baby's forehead with a charcoal cross, a family named Sawaguchi said to be descendants. Every June the village holds a Christ Festival at the graves, in which women in kimono perform a circle dance to that untranslatable song. It is not a church service and it is not a joke either.

Entry to the museum is a couple of hundred yen. Shingo is about an hour from Hachinohe by car and effectively unreachable without one. The hills around it are beautiful and almost nobody is there.