The Christianization of Kyushu: A World-Historical Interpretation of the Jesuit Mission to Japan, 1549-1650
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Date
2021-11-23
Authors
Glowark, Erik
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This dissertation locates Japan’s place in the world-historical phenomenon of Christianization. Intended as a case study in the spread of Christianity across cultures, it uses the Japanese experience with Jesuit missionary activity to highlight the shared features of Christianization as a “connective” world-historical process over centuries. The project aims: 1. To overturn notions of Japan as an isolated society with negligible participation in world history during the premodern period, focusing specifically on its so-called “Christian Century;” and 2. To explore Japan’s place in the inherently polymorphic universe of Christianity that was extended through missionization. With this dissertation, I shed light on how the religion there and elsewhere permits us to see “connections,” across time and space, in how we think about seemingly disparate cultures such as the Japanese, the Nahuas, the ancient Romans, and medieval Germanic peoples. Moreover, it demonstrates how early modern Catholicism resonated with Japanese religious sensibilities.
Employing four parts, three of which mirror the ecclesiological concept of the Communion of Saints, I show how the Japanese fully engaged Christianization on Kyushu. Part I, “The Mechanics of Christianization,” outlines for the first time how this world-historical process played out on Kyushu specifically. Its three chapters focus on three common aspects of the process of Christianization world-historically, namely “missionization,” “community,” and “tension.” Part II, “The Church Militant,” examines how Christian forms of exorcism acted as a “native mode of persuasion” in a variety of premodern societies, Japan included. Japanese Christians embraced and practiced Catholic exorcism on their own, thus greatly facilitating the transplantation of the religion. Part III, “The Church Suffering,” focuses on how the Christian living and the Christian dead constituted one community on Kyushu. Through “the praxis of purgatory,” which included penitential practices, suffrages, and indulgences, Japanese Christians cared for their own “future dead selves” and their dead family members and coreligionists in the afterlife. Part IV, “The Church Triumphant,” shows how the translation of relics was an important part of establishing sacred landscapes in both Buddhism and Christianity. On Kyushu, Japanese Christians carried relics as personal loci of sacrality in addition to those enshrined in churches.
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Keywords
Christianization, Japan, Jesuits, Kyushu, Missions, Sengoku