The Man from Japan

Forget Dan Brown and company, the real plot twist surrounding Jesus comes from...Japan...because the Son of Man was buried there! Jesus, contrary to the popular belief that his name was Yeshua and that he came from Judea, was actually called Kirisuto and lived in the village of Shingomura in Aomori Prefecture, until he was 21 years old when, together with his brother Isukiri, he set out to spread his shiny new religion, a mixture of local versions of Buddhism and animism (!?) throughout the world. After various adventures through Siberia and Central Asia, he arrived in Judea, where his teachings, for some reason, met with great response from the local people, but also hostility from the local rabbis and the Roman authorities, who, as we know, `tailored his hat`...

Pontius Pilate sentenced him to crucifixion and all that, but here Isukiri (who supposedly looked a lot like his brother) bursts into the story and offered to sacrifice himself on the cross so that Kirisuto could survive and continue God's mission. As we know, there is a gap in the biography of Jesus in the Bible, dating back some eighteen years, which has motivated many to speculate about the actions of Jesus (Kirisuto?) during that period.

Kirisuto survived thanks to his brother's sacrifice and headed back to Japan. After many ups and downs, he finally got home and decided to practice spirituality in a more down-to-earth way, dedicated himself to growing rice, got married (sorry Dan Brown, there were people before you with such a theory) and had three daughters. Later, he started preaching again, but these were calm and gentle sermons, traveled throughout all the Japanese islands and passed away at the ripe old age of 106. His lineage supposedly continues to this day in Japan, where the Sawaguchi family still cherishes the tradition of their famous ancestor and tells the legend to the rare visitors and tourists.

On their property is the grave of Kirisuto himself, and nearby is buried an ear of his brother Isukiri (!?) which he managed to obtain in an unknown way from the Roman legionaries (perhaps from Longinus himself who was hanging around on the Calvary ​​hill at the time) and they even have a place where a lock of hair from Mary Magdalene is buried, a certain Jewish woman with whom Kirisuto had a short but intense relationship during his stay in Judea, although it is not known how it all ended...

The documents that the Sawaguchi family had were taken for testing in Tokyo in the 1930s but suffered during the war when Tokyo was bombed with napalm, killing more civilians than in the explosions of the two atomic bombs combined - and many objects of state importance disappeared along with many archives full of writings and documents that were there.

Which is...quite convenient.

(Roger Mortis, 060)