Parrot (asker) Dec 17, 2017:

@YukoShiino It's not that they were not allowed. There was a previous issue about the conflict caused by Christian monotheism that made it more prudent for their parents to prohibit their being taken to jinjas. These children, however, were not told where they were going and later berated for their behaviour. The whole affair ended in an entente about religious freedom which both sides considered a model for future observance.

Parrot (asker) Dec 17, 2017:

Date 1917 Context is a Vatican Archive report on an incident in Nagasaki, when Christian children were told they were going to "faire une promenade (undo-kwai) mais sans en indiquer le but". I took the "undo-kwai" as a synonym because of the placement in the text.

The point of the report is, that the children were prohibited by their parents from approaching jinjas and having to "sampai", and in those days they were a minority allowed a certain negotiated freedom of confession.

It's for historical research.

Carl Freire Dec 17, 2017:

More details, please. Is this contemporary? Historical? If it is a postwar K-12 school context, odds are very strong that Kimura-san's answer is what you are looking for. Granted, even without a specific context if it nonetheless is a postwar matter then it's at least 90% likely that Kimura-san's answer is still appropriate. Still, some more information would be helpful just to help us confirm this for you. Is this French delegation talking about an annual event in which Japanese school kids participate?

("Kwai" is interesting in this connection, because that's a prewar method of transliterating a particular Japanese syllable into English that was abandoned in, IIRC, 1948. Nowadays, about the only place I can recall seeing it is in the romanized version of the name for 関西学院, which is "Kwansei Gakuin.")