Japan’s Christian Century, 1543–1650

Catalog description

In 1543 Portuguese merchants made landfall in Japan by accident. They were welcomed warily by local populations and leaders, who had never seen or interacted with Westerners. Catholic missionaries soon followed the merchants—Jesuits at first, then Franciscans and Dominicans once Spaniards found their way to the archipelago in the 1470s. Eventually the Dutch, too, appeared in the waters off Japan and, briefly, the English. Beginning with the first contact was a century of intense interaction between Japan and the world beyond the Sinosphere, an interaction that was as productive as it was fraught with contradictions and tensions. When the Iberians first arrived, they encountered a country in the throes of a civil war that had already spanned generations. They used the turmoil to their advantage, exploiting vying warlord’s desire for foreign commerce and technology to obtain local access for preachers. A century later, the leaders of a pacified Japan deemed the presence of missionaries politically perilous and socially destabilizing, closing the country to evangelization. Access to Japanese ports was drastically curtailed and controlled, and most of the inroads the Jesuits and others had made in the previous century were rapidly erased. Largely reliant on Iberian accounts—Jesuit missionaries were especially voluble—these decades of cultural and economic exchange have often been referred to as “Japan’s Christian Century,” underscoring the centrality of evangelization to the Iberians, but also overstating the role played by Western merchants and missionaries. To be sure, the “Christian Century” label betrays a self-serving Eurocentric bias, but while the period ultimately remains a cosmopolitan parenthesis—vibrant but largely self-contained—in the longer trajectory of premodern Japanese history, for Japan itself these years also represented a time of undeniable…