Bulletin of Portuguese - Japanese Studies
ISSN: 0874-8438
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Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Portugal
Nosco, Peter
Early Modernity and the States Policies toward Christianity in 16th and 17th century Japan
Bulletin of Portuguese - Japanese Studies, núm. 7, december, 2003, pp. 7-21
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Lisboa, Portugal
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BPJS, 2003, 7, 7-21
EARLY MODERNITY AND THE STATE’S POLICIES
TOWARD CHRISTIANITY
IN 16th AND 17th CENTURY JAPAN
Peter Nosco
University of British Columbia
Introduction
Some years ago in the course of an inquiry into the nature of life among
Tokugawa Japan’s “underground” religious communities, I examined the
Bakuhan 1 state’s policies toward Christianity in the context of its policies
toward other faiths and religionists.2 In this paper, I revisit some concerns
expressed in this earlier scholarship, in which I argued that the state’s
policies toward Christianity at any time during the “Christian century”
are understood better when examined in the context of the state’s policies
toward other religious movements and organizations. I do so by revisiting
five moments in the complex history of religious policy in Japan represented
by the years 1580, 1598, 1615, 1640 and 1688, seeking to identify the
Christian/Kirishitan component or dimension of that policy. I then consider
these findings in terms of Japan’s transformation during the span of years
extending from the late-16th to the late-17th centuries, offering a number
of speculative remarks regarding Christianity’s possible contributions to
aspects of Japan’s early modernity, in particular the construction of collective identity, the emergent public sphere, and the development of a sphere of
individual privacy or “private-life secrecy.” 3
1 “Bakuhan state” is understood here as the collective authority of the central (Bakufu) and
some 250+ domainal (Han) governments.
2 My initial findings were published as “Japanese Policy Toward Religions in the ‘Christian’
Century” in O Século Cristão do Japão (Lisbon, 1994), pp. 569-588. A revised version of this
paper also appeared as “Keeping the faith: bakuhan policy towards religions in seventeenthcentury Japan,” in P.F. Kornicki and I.J. McMullen, eds, Religion in Japan: Arrows to heaven
and earth (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 135-155.
3 Barbara Warren and Barbara Laslett understand “private-life secrecy” as a “response to
ideology: a desire to avert the full wrath of whatever powerful groups are in control of the definition of ‘undesirable elements.’ ” See their “Privacy and Secrecy: A Conceptual Comparison,”
in Stanton Tefft, ed., Secrecy: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (New York, Human Sciences Press,
1980), p. 26.
Peter Nosco
8
1.
1580
In 1571 Oda Nobunaga’s armies overran the Tendai center on Mt. Hiei,
the fountainhead of much Japanese Buddhism, and institutionally the
most important center of Buddhism in Japan at that time. A comparable
slaughter at the True Pure Land’s (Jódo Shin) fortress at Ishiyama was
averted only by the Amidist zealots’ agreement to surrender in 1580. In
these military engagements, there is nothing to suggest that Nobunaga
acted out of religious or spiritual antipathy toward these or any other
Buddhist denominations. Rather, the evidence suggests that Nobunaga
regarded the armies of Mt. Hiei and Ishiyama Honganji, which at the time
both ranked among the ten largest armies in Japan, simply as obstacles
that like any others had to be overcome if he was to attain the military and
political authority he sought.
As Neil McMullin has observed, the power and independence that the
Buddhist temples had acquired over the prior thousand years were “radically reduced,” so that by “the end of the sixteenth century, the temples were
weak and docile, Nobunaga having largely achieved his goal.” 4 Further, the
events of 1571 and 1580 mark the end of an approximately hundred-year
period following the Ónin War during which prelates like Rennyo Kenju
(1415-99) of the Kyoto Honganji embraced a policy of “defense of the
dharma” (gohó) against any and all challenges, thereby asserting the priority
of Buddhist law (Buppó) over secular law (óbó) and authorizing the use of
force in defense of the faith. This, of course, was more easily accomplished
in the absence of meaningful centralized political and military authority,
and thus Nobunaga’s ascendance, and more importantly his reversal of this
subordination of the secular to the sacred, represented important steps in
the separation of church and state. This, in turn, allowed religionists like
those of the Ishiyama Honganji to uphold the spiritual principles of their
creed while at the same time acknowledging the authority of the state.5
Nobunaga next sought to harness the economic and social power of the
temples in service to his nascent state, demonstrating a concern for the civil
and administrative dimensions of his religious policy. Remarkably for
someone known principally for his military exploits, Nobunaga had begun
as early as 1575 having his officials address issues of the sort that within
only a few decades would be handled by the newly created position of Jisha
4 Buddhism and the State in Sixteenth-Century Japan (Princeton, Princeton University Press,
1984), p. 4.
5 Ibid., p. 38. See also Galen Amstutz, The Honganji Institution, 1500-1570: The Politics of
Pure Land Buddhism, Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1992, p. 272.
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Early Modernity and the State’s Policies toward Christianity
9
Bugyó (Commissioner of Temple and Shrine Administration), the principal
office during the Tokugawa period advising the Bakufu Elders (rójú) on religious policy.
This, of course, was also the time when Christianity’s antipathy toward
Buddhism made it a natural ally of Nobunaga. Christianity’s strength in
Kyushu, where Nobunaga’s authority was weakest, may likewise have
contributed to its allure, but whether Nobunaga’s interest in Christianity
had a spiritual dimension or not, his favorable posture toward the Jesuit
mission was unmistakable, and this placed Christianity in a relatively favourable position. Nobunaga’s assassination in 1582 and the rapid ascendance of
Toyotomi Hideyoshi of course destabilized this favored status, but by then
the creed was sufficiently established to hold considerable promise.
2.
1598
The advantage in 1580 of not being Buddhist proved to be a disadvantage for the Catholics during the 1590s. By then, and owing to Nobunaga’s
successful military campaigns, the major Buddhist institutions were no
longer the military obstacles and rival sources of power that they had been
just a decade or two earlier, and this freed them to be potential allies to
the empire-building aspirations of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Despite the recent
introduction of new Confucian texts – a byproduct of the otherwise disastrous invasion of Korea – Buddhism remained the prevailing world view
throughout the Momoyama years (1573-1615). Buddhism’s appreciation for
the evanescent and fugacious, and its esteem of fragility and the delicate in
the midst of much brutality, prevailed in the midst of much monumentality
and considerable brutality.
Hideyoshi redefined the relationship between the individual and the
Japanese state with several measures that dramatically increased the power
of the Bakufu. These included a cadastral survey and census that assessed
the human and natural resources of the polity, the professionalization of
the samurai class and their separation from the land, and the confiscation
of swords and other metal weapons from commoners. One can discern in
these the absolutist aspirations of the new state, as it sought ever-increasing
control over what individuals do and say and even believe. To this end,
Hideyoshi appointed Maeda Gen’i (1539-1602) as one of his Five Commissioners with responsibility for the administration of temples and shrines.
Hideyoshi’s sack of the Shingon temple of Negoro in 1586 was at
one and the same time an attack on the peasantry of that region, as well
a demonstration of his intolerance of religious independence. In 1595
Peter Nosco
10
Hideyoshi again demonstrated this sense of religion in service to the state
through his ordering through Gen’i that each of the ten major denominations contribute one hundred priests to what were intended to be monthly
memorial services for Hideyoshi’s deceased mother. By not responding to
these demonstrations of Hideyoshi’s policies toward religions and their
institutions, Christian authorities, and especially Gaspar Coelho, refused to
see the handwriting on the wall.6
Once the major Buddhist institutions ceased to be a meaningful military threat, the Christian mission no longer shared with would-be unifiers
the common enemy of Buddhism, and as is well known, Hideyoshi began to
suspect the Catholic missions of interference in Japanese domestic politics.
Hideyoshi’s vacillation toward the missions is likewise well known: despite
his non-enforcement of his own 1587 order expelling the padres, Hideyoshi
in 1597 abruptly reversed his de facto tolerance of Christianity by ordering
the execution by crucifixion of twenty-six martyrs in Nagasaki. Though
Hideyoshi again never followed through with the most draconian of his
penalties on the missions, his non-enforced proscription left the Catholics
in a precariously unstable position. This instability notwithstanding, the
missions in various ways showed remarkable vitality, and their preparations for the worst actually served the faithful well when the worst finally
came.
Two other contemporary developments relevant to our inquiry include
the rapd expansion of print culture from the 1590s on, with the first block
printing of secular works, and the emergence of a nascent sense of “Japan”
and “Japaneseness” juxtaposed against a near periphery of Ezo (Hokkaidó),
the Ryúkyú Islands and Korea, and a more remote periphery of China
and Europe. Both of these are significant to the construction of collective
identity and the transition to early modernity, and we return later in this
paper to see Christianity’s contribution to both developments.
3.
1615
Tokugawa Ieyasu accepted the title of sei-i taishógun in 1603, only to
resign it in 1605 by passing it onto his son Hidetada and thereby asserting
the hereditary principle in shogunal succession within a new branch of the
lineage. Ieyasu was much under the influence of two Buddhist prelates,
6 I am indebted to Jurgis Elisonas for the insights contained in this paragraph and presented
first in his remarks at the 1999 International Congress on the History of Christianity in Japan
(Lisbon).
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Early Modernity and the State’s Policies toward Christianity
11
Tenkai and Konchiin Súden (1569-1633). Both officially entered service
in 1608, and both were more prominent as advisors than their historically
better known Confucian contemporary Hayashi Razan.
It is likewise from 1608 that one can observe Ieyasu’s increased concern
with religious policy and the place of religious institutions in a statusoriented society.7 By 1615 the new Bakufu had issued forty-four directives to
specific temples or denominations as a whole as part of an effort to place the
denominations and their network of main and branch temples at the service
of the state. These directives were all written by Súden, though they were
often drafted in collaboration with the affected temples and denominations
themselves, thus contributing to their eventual acceptance. These directives
ended the long-established tradition of extraterritoriality enjoyed by religious institutions in Japan, and hereafter even the conditions of priesthood
were subject to definition by the state.8
Two directives issued by the Bakufu in 1615 one year before Ieyasu’s
death defined the relationship between the Bakufu and its only rivals. The
first, Buke sho hatto, addressed the relationship between the Bakufu and
the domainal lords or Daimyo, and with amendment in 1629 remained in
force until the Tokugawa period’s last decade. The second, Kinchú narabi ni
shohatto, defined the narrow parameters within which the Bakufu allowed
the emperor and his court to move and likewise remained the law in these
matters until the end of the period.
Despite the storm clouds hovering over Christianity’s future in Japan
in the wake of the 1597 crucifixions, the years immediately following
Hideyoshi’s death in 1598 were in some respects Christianity’s best years in
Japan. The number of Christians is believed to have nearly doubled reaching
some 300,000 by 1614, and these years also coincide with the only period
prior to the Meiji when a Catholic Bishop was allowed sustained residence
in Japan. Further, owing to the instability of the Hideyoshi years, Christian
communities throughout Japan began in various ways to prepare for the
eventuality of persecution, and this preparation, however uneven or belated,
would work to the communities’ advantage when Christianity was eventually forced to enter its underground phase.
It was within this context that Ieyasu abruptly proscribed Christianity
in 1612 and ordered the expulsion of 148 foreign clergy in 1614. Rightly or
7 David Howell refers to the status system (mibunsei) as “the central institution of Tokugawa
feudalism and hence to understanding the regime’s social and political order.” In “Territoriality and Collective Identity in Tokugawa Japan,” in Daedalus 127:3 (Summer 1998), p. 106.
8 Tamamuro Fumio, Edo bakufu no shúkyó tósei (Tokyo, Hyóronsha, 1971), pp. 20-22; and
Nihon Bukkyóshi: kinsei (Tokyo, Yoshikawa Kóbunkan, 1987), pp. 5, 25-26.
Peter Nosco
12
wrongly, Christianity appeared inseparable to Ieyasu from the trade and
other intrigues that attended the European presence in Japan, and that
caused him to see the creed as potentially destabilizing. Since the end of the
medieval paradigm of mutual dependence of church and state had already
arrived, and the sacred was now clearly subordinate to the secular, Ieyasu’s
motives seem particularly difficult to discern.9 Sadly, despite the fact that
not a single Christian lost her or his life in Japan for reasons of faith during
the years of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s rule, Christianity began a dramatic decline
which would change the fundamental character of the church in particular
as well as religion generally in Japan.
4.
1640
Following Ieyasu’s death in 1616, the Bakufu renewed an intense
effort to control the thoughts, words and deeds of the population. Under
Tokugawa Hidetada (r. 1605-23), the Bakufu moved to expand its control
over the population by licensing Kabuki theaters and such major pleasure
quarters as the Yoshiwara, and also by regulating the activities of such nondenominational religious practitioners as mountain ascetics (yamabushi).
Except for that with China, foreign trade was restricted in 1616 to the two
ports of Nagasaki and Hirado, and from 1635 just to Nagasaki. Personal
faith could now for the first time be a crime in Japan, as hundreds of Christians were executed in both Kyoto (1619) and Nagasaki (1622). This intensification of the effort to control the private lives of individuals intensified
still further under the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu (r. 1623-51). Under
the sankin kótai alternate attendance system phased in during the years
1635-42, Daimyo were now required to spend half of their time resident in
Edo, where their families were permanent hostages under the watchful eye
of the Bakufu.
To enlist religious institutions in support of the effort to control individual lives, the Bakufu instituted the terauke shó mon, a policy that required
everyone to register family births, deaths and marriages at local Buddhist
temples, which thus became the equivalent of parish registries. In other
words, despite the advances that Confucianism made in intellectual circles
during the Tokugawa period, Buddhism functioned in a manner akin to that
of a state religion and was instrumental in the Bakufu’s efforts to ferret out
9 Oguri Junko, “Kakure nenbutsu,” in Kataoka Yakichi, et al., comps., Kinsei no chika shinkó
(Tokyo, Hyóronsha, 1974), pp. 210-213, 228-229. Ieyasu may have particularly feared additional sources of instability in anticipation of his final assault in 1615 on Hideyoshi’s surviving
heir Hideyori.
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Early Modernity and the State’s Policies toward Christianity
13
proscribed religious activity. Further, from 1635 the entire gamut of religious activities was placed under the supervision of the Jisha Bugyó or
Commissioner(s) of Temples and Shrines, whose powers exceeded that of
other Tokugawa Commissioners in that they had the authority to initiate
inquiries and even to conduct trials without prior Bakufu approval.
Religious organizations, however, remained sources of problems for
the Bakufu even after they no longer posed military or political threats.
One example concerns the manner in which the Bakufu was drawn into
arbitrating a theological issue internal to the Nichiren denomination of
Buddhism. The issue concerned the interpretation of an individual believer’s
responsibility toward non-believers, with one faction arguing from a fundamentalist perspective that Nichiren believers should shun non-believers,
and another faction arguing that under appropriate circumstances accommodation is feasible. From a quarrel among believers, the dispute grew into
a squabble between Nichiren temples and their lineages, and eventually
into a contest between the Bakufu and the denomination itself. In 1630 the
Bakufu proscribed the activities of the fundamentalist elements, who then
took their practices “underground” where they remained almost invisible
within the labyrinthine network of Nichiren temples. From there, they
remained an unpleasant reminder of the limits of the Bakufu’s authority in
matters of personal faith and religious practice.
The Bakufu’s success was similarly uneven in its efforts to control the
activities of emperors in the religious arena. Emperors had long enjoyed
the prerogative of conferring highly coveted “purple robes” (shie) upon the
highest ranking Buddhist prelates. This practice had evolved into an important source of revenue for the court during financially straitened times,
since the conferring of the robes was inevitably accompanied by lavish
donations from the recipients. In 1613, however, the Bakufu insisted that
emperors receive the endorsement of the Bakufu prior to conferring the
robes, with the intent being to restrict this independent source of revenue
for the court. Thus, when in 1627 Emperor Gomizunoo conferred shie upon
the prelates of two temples without the Bakufu’s permission, the Bakufu
declared the vestments to be invalid and ordered their confiscation. Both
sides were humiliated by this incident: the Bakufu because it was defied by
the court; and, Gomizunoo because of the defeat of his defiance.
The proscription of Christianity had comparably mixed results. There
were more than 17,000 adult baptisms in Japan during the years 1614-26,
when Christianity was unambiguously proscribed. European clergy continued to be smuggled into Japan in defiance of the 1614 expulsion order,
and from 1615-21 the number of foreign priests in Japan actually increased
to twenty-six. Conversely, by 1640 the number of Christians in Japan is
14
Peter Nosco
believed to have dropped by nearly half from its peak of some three decades
earlier. Still, it is remarkable that some 150,000 generally poorly trained
Christians, who were at best partially prepared for a new spiritual life underground, chose to defy the Bakuhan state and to risk death by clandestinely
continuing to practice their faith.
It is in this context that we can situate the Shimabara uprising of 163738, in which some 37,000 disaffected individuals across all classes rebelled
under Christian banners against the Tokugawa state. The Bakufu’s armies
were initially insufficient to the task of quelling the rebellion, and a coalition army of as many as 100,000 assembled from five neighboring han had
considerable difficulty before it eventually won a total victory over the insurgents, all of whom perished. Immediately following the rebellion, the Bakufu
issued its harshest anti-Christian edicts and established what became in
some areas an annual anti-Christian inquisition (shûmon aratame no yaku).
Portuguese vessels were excluded from Japanese ports after 1639, restricting
contact with Europeans to the Dutch who were transferred from Hirado to
Deshima in 1641.
Under Japanese law, convictions for violation of its religious policies
depended principally upon confession, and secondarily on the corroborated
testimony of informants. This mode of jurisprudence contributed to the
growing skill in dissembling and prevarication on the part of defendants, of
which the experience of Antonio Ishida in 1631 is illustrative. Called before
the Nagasaki Commissioner Takenaka Shigeyoshi, Ishida was informed that
if he will only acknowledge his primary allegiance and obedience to the
shogun, he may “continue to believe what he pleased in his own heart.” 10
This is clearly an acknowledgement by a representative of the Bakuhan state
of a new realm of privacy in the area of personal belief and faith, and later
in this paper we shall reexamine this development in terms of its possible
contribution to the creation of a public sphere in early modern Japan.
5. 1688
The Japan of 1688, the first year of the Genroku (1688-1704) era, was
a very different place from the Japan of 1640. Edo had surpassed Kyoto as
Japan’s – and perhaps even the world’s – most populous city, and enjoyed
a vibrant popular culture, including best-selling works of fiction, a lively
and excellent theater, striking advances in poetry, and manifestations of
10 George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge,
Harvard University, 1973), p. 1989; and Herbert Cieslik, Krishitan jinbutsu no kenkyû (Tokyo,
Yoshikawa Kóbunkan, 1963), pp. 98-107.
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Early Modernity and the State’s Policies toward Christianity
15
an expansive print culture. The communications and transportation infrastructure was such that foot traffic on the Tókaidó rivaled that on the main
boulevards of Europe, and the regnant shogun Tsunayoshi (r. 1680-1709)
prided himself less on military accomplishments, of which he had none,
than on his knowledge of Neo-Confucian texts and his love of animals.
The illiberal tendencies of earlier decades in religious matters reached
something of a high point during the 1650s and the early 1660s when one
could be imprisoned for being named without corroboration as either a
Nichiren (fufu fuse) fundamentalist or a Christian, and followers of both
traditions had of necessity by this point become practiced in the initial
stages of maintaining an “underground” existence. The Inquisition official
(shûmon aratame no yaku) Inoue Masashige (1585-1661) acknowledged as
much in 1658 when in reference to uncovered Christians, he wrote that,
“The suspects, when questioned whether they were Christians, at first hid
nothing at all and responded that they were. Nowadays, however, they hide
their religion as best they can.” 11
But if the 1650s and early 1660s represent something of a peak of religious repression in Japan, they likewise signal the start of a decline in the
state’s efforts to assert its authority in religious matters, and there is ample
evidence to support the conclusion that the Bakuhan state was rapidly
retreating from enforcement of its anti-Christian policies. For example,
whereas some two-thirds of the 600 Christians from Ômura who were
discovered in 1657 and refused to disavow their faith were executed,
a decade later in 1668 not one of some thirty Christians discovered in
Usuki was executed, though three eventually died in prison while awaiting
sentencing.12
That even in a former hotbed of Christian activity like Nagasaki, the
state had become almost indifferent to the enforcement of its anti-Christian
policies by the 1690s is confirmed by the observations of Engelbert
Kaempfer, a German physician assigned to the Dutch factory in Deshima.
Kaempfer wrote in his History of Japan how in 1688 there were upwards of
50 “Bungoso” or “Rabble of Bungo,” i.e. Christians, imprisoned in Nagasaki:
“The … so-called bungo só… [the Rabble from Bungo, are]
the Christians, of whom they still keep fifty souls imprisoned
here, counting wives and children. Occasionally still more arrive
11 Anesaki Masaharu, Krishitan shómon no hakugai to senpuku, second reprint (Tokyo,
Kokusho Kankókai, 1987), p. 86.
12 Murai Sanae, Bakuhansei seiritsu to Kirishitan kinsei (Tokyo, Bunken Shuppan, 1987),
pp. 71-72.
16
Peter Nosco
(in 1688 a further three people). They do not know anything about
the Christian faith except the name of our true savior, but much
prefer to die in their simple belief than to gain their freedom,
as they could, by renouncing their redeemer… Because of their
simplemindedness, and since such severity is no longer required,
they are spared execution and have to spend the rest of their lives
in this temporal hell on very poor food and water.”13
For our purposes, the most significant of Kaempfer’s observations
are that: arrests for violations of the anti-Christian policy have become
infrequent; that those arrested are those who would rather perish than apostatize; that Christians imprisoned in Nagasaki seem to have poor knowledge
of Catholic doctrine; and that execution is rarely invoked as punishment.
All of these indicate that both the state and the “underground church” had
arrived at a new, more practical relationship.
Indeed, in various ways, underground Christianity and Christians seem
to have been in various ways “left behind” by the rapidly changing society
of Genroku Japan. In a society in which a vast array of cultural practices
– the writing of fiction and plays, woodblock printing, private academies
offering instruction in previously exclusive subjects, and so on – had become
commodicized and broadly appropriated, Christianity itself had become
fossilized and in some cases distressingly incoherent by virtue of its separation from the Church in Europe. If this is true, it is ironic since, as I wish
to suggest in the sections that follow, Christianity may have contributed
meaningfully to precisely the kinds of social changes that now rendered
Christianity and its adherents marginal.
6.
Speculation regarding possible influences and contributions
That Japan was a very different place in 1688 than in, say, 1570 is
certainly unarguable, but the nature of the change and the factors behind
it remain the subject of lively debate among historians and social scientists,
particularly as they relate to the emergence of “early modernity” in Japan.
In a recent article, Schmuel Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schlucter have
written that early modernity “refers to the period from the sixteenth to
the eighteenth centuries, when territorial states became major vehicles for
resource mobilization and for the construction of collective identities…
13 Beatrice M. Bodart-Bailey, ed., trans. and annot., Kaempfer’s Japan: Tokugawa Culture
Observed (Honolulu, Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1999), p. 144.
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Early Modernity and the State’s Policies toward Christianity
17
bound up with the nation-state but embedded in a cultural program that
entailed different modes of structuring the major arenas of social life.” 14 It is
in this sense that early modernity is meaningfully linked to both identity and
nation-state formation.
Despite its foreignness – in fact precisely because of its alterity – Christianity likely contributed in a variety of ways to identity formation in Japan
during the years under question. Identity formation requires positing a
sense of self in juxtaposition against an other, and while Japan’s traditional
other had for over a thousand years been China, it was during the “Christian
century” that a far more expansive sense of what lay overseas came to be
embraced by Japanese elites. In recent years a number of scholars 15 have
written regarding the creation during the Tokugawa period of a sense
of Japan’s place at the center of a geographic space bounded by a near
periphery comprised of Korea, Hokkaidô and the Ryûkyû Islands. This
imagined terrain resembled a series of concentric circles which had Japan
at its center, northeast Asia as its periphery, and Christian Europe as its
perimeter, and it thus represents one aspect of Christianity’s contribution to
the construction of a sense of “Japan” and “Japaneseness.”
In his Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson writes of the nation
as an imagined community because, “regardless of the actual inequality and
exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a
deep horizontal comradeship,” 16 and his phrasing has particular relevance
for our inquiry, since this is also the way in which Christianity conceives of
the community of the faithful.
From an evangelist’s perspective, the spiritual terrain of Japan –
its class distinctions and stratification notwithstanding – was just such a
potential “horizontal comradeship,” and numerous students of Christianity
in Japan have observed that part of Christianity’s appeal lay in its high
regard for women, the dignity it accorded to the individual person, and
its attendant sense of charity. Furthermore, from the early perspective of the
foreign evangelist, and as one can see in the initial assessments of St. Francis
Xavier, Japan was viewed as a singular entity with a singularly propitious
population, and one of the tasks of this mission was to educate and raise
the understanding of its evangelists regarding the Japanese mission field.
This, of course, required training in history and culture, language and litera-
14 “Introduction: Paths to Early Modernities – A Comparative View,” in Daedalus 127:3
(Summer 1998), special issue on “Early Modernities,” pp. 1-3.
15 See, for example, David L. Howell, op. cit., esp. pp. 129-133.
16 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition
(New York, Verso, 1991), p. 7.
18
Peter Nosco
ture, customs and mores, but observe how each of these requires to some
extent the effacement of regional and individual distinction and variation.
Though the mission was always small and short of the resources it needed,
it was at the same time sufficiently large and exotic enough for persons in
Japan to wish to learn the visitors’ novel perspectives on “Japan,” and from
these perspectives there emerged a more richly multifaceted “gaze” which
Japanese persons in Japan could in turn focus upon themselves.
Two important elements in the formation of the Jesuits’ “gaze” were
their language study and their printing press. It is believed that as many
as one hundred separate titles were printed by the Jesuits, of which fewer
than forty survive, but among these were the first printed work of Japanese
literature (Heike monogatari), and a dictionary and grammar of Japanese
compiled by Rodrigues (1561-1633).17 Dictionaries and grammars by their
very nature homogenize language in an arbitrary and inevitably artificial
manner, effacing regionalisms and dialects, and at the same time deliberately proposing the notion of a static national language. Similarly, the publication of works of literature is an important step in the formation of a canon
of classics, and such canons are themselves integral to the construction of an
imagined cultural patrimony shared both horizontally and universally.
Another possible contribution of Christianity to Japan’s early modernity
relates to the construction of both public and private spheres. As we have
already observed, Christianity entered Japan at precisely the moment when
the relationship of secular authority to spiritual authority – a distinction
which Christianity sharpened by virtue of its being outside the ôbô/Buppô
paradigm – was being contested by Japan’s Sengoku unifiers. One consequence of this contestation was the increased sense of “religion” as a distinctive and important sphere of human activity, as confirmed by the increasing
importance of the Office of Shrine and Temple Affairs, and since religious
activity generally has both a private and a public character, Christianity may
likewise be regarded as a form of voluntary association that contributed to
the eventual creation of both private and public spheres in early modern
Japan. Let me explain.
One feature of medieval Japanese spirituality was the impressive
variety of religious options available to the questing soul. Indeed this variety
is often regarded as the hallmark of so-called Kamakura Buddhism, and
it far surpassed the range of options available in Europe at the same time.
17 Peter Kornicki, The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth
Century (Leiden, Brill, 1998), pp. 125-127. And, Johannes Laures, Kirishitan bunko: a manual
of books and documents on the early Christian mission in Japan (Tokyo, Sophia University Press,
1940), pp. 55-60.
Early Modernity and th
Early Modernity and the State’s Policies toward Christianity
19
Attendant to this variety was a new measure of human agency as the individual enjoyed first, remarkable freedom in choice in religion, and second,
within several of these religious options – the Amidist, Lotus and Zen movements representing the most obvious – an impressive capacity to negotiate one’s eschatological consequences in a manner consistent with what
St. Paul spoke of as “working out one’s salvation” (Phil 2:12). Both this
religious pluralism and new confidence in personal salvation contribute to
the sense of agency so fundamental to an early modern understanding of
the integrity of the individual, and both were unquestionably enhanced by
the addition of Christianity 18 to the spiritual field. And, of course, with the
rise of yet more “new” religions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
religious affiliation came increasingly to have the character of the sort of
voluntary association that represents the limited civil society in Tokugawa
Japan.19
Finally, I wish to revisit the issue of the persecution of Christians and
its relationship to the creation of a sphere of privacy in Tokugawa Japan.
Again, since enforcement of the state’s religious policies, including the
proscription of Christianity, required either confession on the part of those
suspected, or the condemning testimony of members of one’s own community, Christians, Nichiren fujufuse Buddhist and other religious criminals
became skilled in prevarication and dissembling as defensive strategies
against the wrath of the state. When the state came to understand in
mid-17th-century Japan that there was nothing to be gained from executing
violators of religious policies – individuals who were generally in other
respects model citizens – and thereby retreated from enforcement of its
religious policies, an unintended result was the creation of a sphere of
private-life secrecy.20
Though much has been written regarding the importance of a “public
sphere” (as distinct from either an “official sphere” or a “private sphere”) as
a condition of early modernity, the possible – I am inclined to write probable
– requirement of an attendant sense of individual privacy is no less important. I would argue that it is not possible to have a meaningful public sphere
in a society which does not recognize meaningful individual privacy. If I
18 One is tempted to write Christianities in response to the presence in Japan of competing
missions.
19 See my “Confucian Perspectives on Civil Society and Government,” in Nancy L. Rosenblum
and Robert Post, eds., Civil Society and Government (Princeton, Princeton University Press,
2002) pp. 334-359.
20 See above, n. 2, and also my “Secrecy and the Transmission of Tradition: Issues in the Study
of the “Underground” Christians, in Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 20:1 (March 1993),
pp. 3-29.
20
Peter Nosco
am correct in this, then here again Christianity may be regarded as having
made an important contribution to Japan’s early modernity through its unintended role of nurturing the sort of private-life secrecy in the 17th-, 18th- and
19th-century Japan that proved consistent with participation in the emergent
public sphere.
Conclusion
The effort to contextualize the state’s policies toward Christianity within
the state’s policies toward religions generally represents an approach that
has been embraced neither by those who would seek to efface Christianity’s
importance and contributions to this age, nor by those who would argue
Christianity’s centrality to the culture of the early-Edo period. Nonetheless,
the approach has much to commend it, particularly in terms of arriving at a
more balanced assessment of the achievements and contributions of Christianity, particularly Catholicism, during the so-called “Christian Century” in
Japan.
In representations of 15th-, 16th- and 17th-century European history,
Catholicism is often characterized as a regressive element, invoking its
authority and exercising its considerable influence to frustrate social
change, especially any change that would privilege the position of the
individual vis a vis the Church. These negative representations tend to
emphasize the Catholic Church’s control over vast amounts of land, and its
adherence to relationships rooted in feudalism as opposed to relationships
involving movements of capital.
An examination of the experience and influence of Catholicism in
Japan, however, may help to balance this view, distinguishing the institutional impact of the Church in Europe from its social and intellectual
influence elsewhere. When we examine Catholicism’s contributions and
influences in this light, we find that in a variety of ways which I have tried
to suggest above, Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular may
be credited with a range of direct and indirect contributions to early modernity which have heretofore been generally under-appreciated. Belief in the
eternal and universal validity, and salvific properties of Catholicism is of
course fundamental to Catholic doctrine, though theologians have often
had to battle with historians who cite contrarian examples in support of a
less affirmative perspective. Perhaps, however, it is this negative contrarian
view which is in need of reassessment, and it is hoped that my examination of the historical experience of Christianity in Japan – speculative, to be
sure – will nonetheless contribute to the task.
Early Modernity and th
Early Modernity and the State’s Policies toward Christianity
21
Abstract
The details of the reception and persecution of Christians in Japan are relatively well known and are not repeated here. This article instead tries to place these
matters into the broader context of Japanese state policy toward religions in Japan.
Obviously, because of the “foreignness” of Christianity and the political/economic
factors that attended its introduction, Christianity’s reception in Japan was meaningfully different from that of other religions. But, in some ways our understanding of
Christianity’s fate in Japan can be enhanced by examining the nascent state’s policies
toward other religious movements and practitioners, such as the Nichiren-shu and
Jodo Shin Buddhists, divination specialists, and so on. This article makes a preliminary attempt at such analysis.
Resumo
Os pormenores da admissão e perseguição dos cristãos no Japão são relativamente conhecidos, por isso não são aqui repetidos. Este artigo procura, antes,
inserir esses acontecimentos no contexto mais amplo da política estatal japonesa
face às religiões no Japão. Obviamente, devido à sua origem estrangeira, bem como
aos factores políticos e económicos que assistiram à sua introdução, o Cristianismo
teve uma recepção significativamente diferente das outras religiões. Todavia, o nosso
entendimento do destino do Cristianismo no Japão, pode beneficiar de uma análise
das políticas deste estado emergente para com outros movimentos religiosos e os seus
praticantes como, por exemplo, os budistas Jodo Shin e Nichiren-shu, especialistas
de divinização, etc. Este artigo é uma tentativa inicial para realizar uma tal análise.
要旨
本稿は、一般的に知られている日本におけるキリスト教徒に対しての容認と迫
害の詳しいことについてではなく､これらの事を宗教に関する日本国家政策と
いう、
より広い視点から考察しようとしたものである。確かに、
キリスト教の 外
来性 、
または、
その伝来と絡んだ政治的､経済的な要因のため、
キリスト教に
対しての容認が他の宗教と比べ、
かなり異質なものだと考えられる。
しかし、本
稿では、他の宗教運動及び日蓮宗と浄土真宗の仏教信者、
占い師などの宗教
実践者 に対する初期の国家政策を考察することによって、
日本におけるキリス
ト教の盛衰を一層明らかにすることができると提案し､その分析を試みた。