PhD thesis defence by Takuya Shimada
The Jesuit Mission in Japan (1549-1639) and the so-called Tensho Embassy (1582-1590) – the first (Catholic) European-Japanese direct encounters in history – have been conventionally and predominantly written from missionary and/or European perspectives in historiography, based largely on Jesuit sources. Such an approach has prevailed despite the clear cross-cultural nature of the encounters.
Offering a view from a Japanese standpoint, this thesis examines the question of cultural (in)commensurability between the buke (warlord-class) community (including the Embassy’s ‘legates’) and Jesuit missionaries (and the Embassy’s hosts in Italy) in the context of the Tokugawa shogunate’s expulsion of the Jesuits and other (Catholic) Europeans from Japan from 1614.
This thesis discusses 1) the agency of the adolescent legates while in Italy in 1585, 2) their behavioural context through the buke’s traditional code, 3) the Jesuits’ ‘understanding’ of the buke’s political ethics behind their missionary practices in Japan, 4) the fermentation of distrust in the Jesuits among buke members, and 5) ethos and pathos of the buke-ruled society.
Overall, this thesis proposes that a certain habitus – a teleological(-theological) manner of perception, reasoning, and action – rendered the Jesuits (and the hosts generally) incapable of acknowledging Japanese alterity per se and of building a good rapport with buke rulers. The buke community’s political-cultural forces, which were organically grounded on historical events and practices but were rather superficially and wilfully interpreted by the Jesuits, proved to be vital in the way in which the buke-Jesuit negotiation unfolded.
Methodologically, this thesis demonstrates how the Jesuits constructed a unilateral knowledge – and what may be called positive ignorance – of the Japanese Other for Europe and for subsequent historiography. The thesis fills the lacunae by complementing the Jesuits’ history with various buke members’, underscoring the significance of the buke-Jesuit cultural (in)commensurability however much impalpable it may have been in historiography and in history.