内容摘要：Members know its going to take decades of work for these lands and waterways to heal.

Members know its going to take decades of work for these lands and waterways to heal.

Masatsugu Tanimoto, a farmer and a community leader who is one of only hundreds of so-called “hidden” Christians on the island of Ikitsuki, shows a notebook of handwritten “orasho” prayers passed down orally for generations at his home in Ikitsuki Island in Hirado, southern Japan, Sunday, April 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)About 40 years ago, in his mid-20s, he took Orasho lessons from his uncle so he could pray to the Closet God that his family has kept for generations.

Tanimoto recently showed the AP a weathered copy of a prayer his grandfather wrote with a brush and ink, like the ones his ancestors had diligently copied from older generations.As he carefully turned the pages of the Orasho book, Tanimoto said he mostly understands the Japanese but not the Latin. It’s difficult, he said, but “we just memorize the whole thing.”Today, because funerals are no longer held at homes and younger people are leaving the island, Orasho is only performed two or three times a year.

There are few studies of Hidden Christians so it’s not clear how many still exist.There were an estimated 30,000 in Nagasaki, including about 10,000 in Ikitsuki, in the 1940s, according to government figures. But the last confirmed baptism ritual was in 1994, and some estimates say there are less than 100 Hidden Christians left on Ikitsuki.

Hidden Christianity is linked to the communal ties that formed when Japan was a largely agricultural society. Those ties crumbled as the country modernized after WWII, with recent developments revolutionizing people’s lives, even in rural Japan.

The accompanying decline in the population of farmers and young people, along with women increasingly working outside of the home, has made it difficult to maintain the tight networks that nurtured Hidden Christianity.In “Never Flinch,” Holly Gibney is hired as a bodyguard by a women’s rights activist whose lecture tour is being plagued by mysterious acts of violence. In the afterward of the book, King includes a tribute to “supporters of women’s right to choose who have been murdered for doing their duty.” “I’m sure they’re not going to like that,” King says of right-wing critics.

The original germ for “The Life of Chuck” had nothing to do with current events. One day in Boston, King noticed a drummer busking on Boylston Street. He had the vision of a businessman in a suit who, walking by, can’t resist dancing with abandon to the drummer’s beat.King, a self-acknowledged dancer (though only in private, he notes), latched onto a story that would turn on the unpredictable nature of people, tracing the inner life of that imagined passerby. In the film, he’s played by Tom Hiddleston. Chuck first appears, oddly, on a billboard that haunts and confuses a local teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who’s struggling to get his students to care about literature or education with the possible end of the world encroaching.

Mike Flanagan, second from right, writer/director of “The Life of Chuck,” poses with cast members, from left, Annalise Basso, Tom Hiddleston and Carl Lumbly at the premiere of the film on Monday, June 2, 2025, at Hollywood Legion Theater in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)Mike Flanagan, second from right, writer/director of “The Life of Chuck,” poses with cast members, from left, Annalise Basso, Tom Hiddleston and Carl Lumbly at the premiere of the film on Monday, June 2, 2025, at Hollywood Legion Theater in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)