Pro-life Catholics and supporters took to the streets of Tokyo with prayer, public witness, and a clear message about the value of unborn life. The march unfolded in a country where abortion has been legal for decades and where faithful Catholic voices remain a tiny minority, yet the gathering carried a steady confidence that did not feel small at all.
On Marine Day, Fr. Thomas Onoda, FSSPX, marched alongside two other priests and about 40 lay Catholics, bringing with them a flower-covered statue of Our Lady of Fatima. Banners and prayers turned the city route into something more than a procession, giving the event the feel of a peaceful public act of reparation.
Fr. Onoda said the heart of the witness was not just activism, but faith. “Our Lady of Fatima said she can stop the war and give us peace,” he told LifeSiteNews, tying peace in the world to prayer and repentance for the millions of children lost to abortion.
He was equally blunt about the Church’s responsibility. “The Catholic Church has the duty to bear unwavering witness to the truth about the origin of human life, its beginning and dignity, about the crime of abortion,” he said, framing the march as a duty, not a trend or a symbol.
The scene in Tokyo carried extra weight because Catholics are such a small slice of Japanese society, roughly 0.3 percent to 0.4 percent of the population. That makes any open Catholic witness stand out, especially in a place where secular culture is dominant and public religion often keeps a low profile.
Japan’s Catholic history also lingers in the background. The destruction of Nagasaki in World War II devastated the largest Catholic community in the country, and the memory of hidden believers still echoes through Japanese Catholic life today.
The abortion story in Japan is even more sobering. Legalized in 1948 under the Eugenic Protection Act and widened the following year for financial hardship, abortion became widespread, and the human toll has been staggering.
Fr. Onoda said more than 40 million babies have died from abortion in Japan since then, a number he said dwarfs Japan’s wartime dead. He described the practice as a direct assault on the future of the nation, not just on individual families.
“The medical doctors and nurses on duty to protect the lives of innocent have been crushing powerless human beings in their safest place. The war against the future and the hope of the nation has been waged,” he remarked. It was a sharp line, but it captured the moral urgency driving the march.
The Tokyo March for Life itself has been around since 2014, starting with a Protestant and a Catholic who were inspired by the U.S. March for Life. Since 2017, the procession has included the statue of Our Lady of Fatima every year, even through the disruption of COVID.
For Fr. Onoda, that Marian devotion reaches back into Japan’s own hidden past. He pointed to the Catholics who lived their faith in secret for more than 250 years after Christianity was banned, calling them people who were always looking for their mother, Santa Maria Sama.
“They are always looking for their mother, the mother who gave us the true Savior, the mother who gives us hope, love, peace and courage to all mothers and babies to come. The mother who promised the end of war, and the triumph of her Immaculate Heart.”
That kind of language gave the march a tone that was both solemn and strangely hopeful. In a city that can move fast and look past religion, the procession made a different kind of claim, one that insisted prayer still matters, babies still matter, and public witness still has a place on the streets of Tokyo.
