内容摘要：GREEN BAY, Wis. (AP) — A Wisconsin man doing time for trying to kill his mother was convicted Wednesday of

GREEN BAY, Wis. (AP) — A Wisconsin man doing time for trying to kill his mother was convicted Wednesday of

After emerging from cloistered isolation in 1865, following more than 200 years of violent harassment by Japan’s insular warlord rulers, many of the formerly underground Christians converted to mainstream Catholicism.Some, however, continued to practice not the religion that 16th century foreign missionaries originally taught them, but the idiosyncratic, difficult to detect version they’d nurtured during centuries of clandestine cat-and-mouse with a brutal regime.

On Ikitsuki and other remote sections of Nagasaki prefecture, Hidden Christians still pray to these disguised objects. They still chant in a Latin that hasn’t been widely used in centuries. And they still cherish a religion that directly links them to a time of samurai, shoguns and martyred missionaries and believers.Now, though, the Hidden Christians are dying out, and there is growing certainty that their unique version of Christianity will die with them. Almost all are now elderly, and as the young move away to cities or turn their backs on the faith, those remaining are desperate to preserve evidence of this offshoot of Christianity — and convey to the world what its loss will mean.“At this point, I’m afraid we are going to be the last ones,” said Masatsugu Tanimoto, 68, one of the few who can still recite the Latin chants that his ancestors learned 400 years ago. “It is sad to see this tradition end with our generation.”

Christianity spread rapidly in 16th century Japan when Jesuit priests had spectacular success converting warlords and peasants alike, most especially on the southern main island of Kyushu, where the foreigners established trading ports in Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands, by some estimates, embraced the religion.That changed after the shoguns began to see Christianity as a threat. The crackdown that followed in the early 17th century was fierce, with thousands killed and the remaining believers chased underground.

As Japan opened up to foreign influence, a dozen Hidden Christians clad in kimono cautiously declared their faith, and their remarkable perseverance, to a French Catholic priest in March 1865 in Nagasaki city.

Many became Catholics after Japan formally lifted the ban on Christianity in 1873.The talks will also touch on “issues on the international agenda, including the situation around Ukraine,” Russian media reported, citing the Security Council’s press team. Shoigu, formerly Russia’s defense minister, last traveled to Pyongyang in late March.

In April, the Kremlin confirmed that North Korean troopsto repel a Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk border region.

At the time, Putin praisedwho he said stood “shoulder to shoulder with Russian fighters, defended our Motherland as their own.”