En los últimos tiempos los cubanos

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 a society of growing individualism, it is difficult to keep Hidden Christianity as it is,” said Shigeo Nakazono, the head of a local folklore museum who has researched and interviewed Hidden Christians for 30 years. Hidden Christianity has a structural weakness, he said, because there are no professional religious leaders tasked with teaching doctrine and adapting the religion to environmental changes.

Nakazono has started collecting artifacts and archiving video interviews he’s done with Hidden Christians since the 1990s, seeking to preserve a record of the endangered religion.“Whatever they may have done in their youth, and I would argue most of them didn’t do anything, to be targeted in this way by the prosecutors is just wrong,” said Weinstein. “Whatever you think of their music — the violence, the misogynistic lyrics — that is not a reason to go after these guys.”

Weinstein continued, adding, “People like my client, Mr. Kendrick, had to be incarcerated for 2 1/2 years or more, in the case of some of these defendants, for a crime that they didn’t do.”in jail. He was one of two defendants who didn’t take plea deals, and the only one

, including a murder charge in the 2015 drive-by shooting death of rival gang member Donovan Thomas Jr., known as “Big Nut.”In a statement to The Associated Press, Willis spokesperson Jeff DiSantis said “anti-gang efforts” have yielded “over 400 convictions of gang members” since Willis became district attorney, including 19 people in this case. Those efforts were “key” in making Fulton County “safer, taking dangerous offenders off the streets and sending a message that gang activity will not be tolerated in our community,” he said.