Women Religious Leaders in Japan's Christian Century, 1549-1650

Haruko Nawata Ward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351871815
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Meticulously researched and drawing on original source materials written in eight different languages, this study fills a lacuna in the historiography of Christianity in Japan, which up to now has paid little or no attention to the experience of women. Focusing on the century between the introduction of Christianity in Japan by Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in 1549 and the Japanese government's commitment to the eradication of Christianity in the mid-seventeenth century, this book outlines how women provided crucial leadership in the spread, nurture, and maintenance of the faith through various apostolic ministries. The author's research on the religious backgrounds of women from different schools of late medieval Japanese Shinto-Buddhism sheds light on individual women's choices to embrace or reject the Reformed Catholicism of the Jesuits, and explores the continuity and discontinuity of their religious expressions. The book is divided into four sections devoted to an in-depth study of different types of apostolates: nuns (women who took up monastic vocations), witches (the women leaders of the Shinto-Buddhist tradition who resisted Jesuit teachings), catechists (women who engaged in ministries of persuasion and conversion), and sisters (women devoted to missions of mercy). Analyzing primary sources including Jesuit histories, letters and reports, especially Luís Fróis' História de Japão, hagiography and family chronicles, each section provides a broad understanding of how these women, in the context of misogynistic society and theology, utilized resources from their traditional religions to new Christian adaptations and specific religio-social issues, creating unique hybrids of Catholicism and Buddhism. The inclusion of Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese texts, many available for the first time in English, and the dramatic conclusion that women were largely responsible for the trajectory of Christianity in early modern Japan, makes this book an essential reading for scholars of women's history, religious history, history of Christianity, and Asian history.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The Christian Century in Japan spans the period between the arrival of the Jesuits in 1549 and the church’s banishment in 1650.¹ Christianity flourished in this brief moment in history. It offered both benefits and challenges to women living in a society with long-standing Shinto-Buddhist traditions.² Many women became Christians (Kirishitans), with some becoming leaders, while others chose to remain faithful Shinto-Buddhists.³ In this encounter, women developed novel ways of expressing their new religious identity. This book tells a series of stories of Kirishitan women who created apostolic ministries out of resources from both Catholic and Shinto-Buddhist traditions.

Some folding screens from this period, called nanban byōbu, depict vivid impressions of women breathing in the new culture.⁴ These byōbu conventionally describe simultaneous scenes of the encounter between the Japanese and the nanban people. For example, in one of these byōbu, the lower tier scene shows a captain and sailors emerging from a Portuguese ship, accompanied by Malayan, Indian, and African slaves carrying their merchandise.⁵ On the street they meet a group of strolling figures including a Portuguese Jesuit padre, a Japanese irmão, a Spanish Franciscan, and more Portuguese and Japanese merchants.⁶ The middle tier depicts the interiors of Japanese merchants’ row homes. From each home a woman is peeking through a window observing the foreign crowd on the street. In the very center of the byōbu, a young woman parts the entrance curtain to see better (See fig. 1.1). The top tier is an illustration of a church, which resembles a large Japanese noble residence. In one room, a European Jesuit padre and a Japanese irmão are having a discussion over a book. In the next room, another padre is hearing confessions from a Japanese samurai. In what seems to be a sanctuary, four Japanese and two Portuguese individuals are praying in front of an altar together. Among them is a Kirishitan noblewoman. The eyes of these several women on this screen appear curious, serious and intense. The women’s gaze makes the observer of the byōbu wonder what they were looking at so intently and what their inner thoughts were.

There are several important historical factors which influenced the women’s responses to the Jesuit religion. First, the Christian Century is almost synonymous with the century of the Portuguese Jesuit mission. Carrying the vision of Ignatius of Loyola in the spirit of the Catholic Reform, Francis Xavier and his companions launched the first Christian mission in Japanese history in 1549.⁷ It was six years after Portuguese merchants first set foot on Japanese soil, and only nine years after Pope Paul III constituted the Society of Jesus by his bull Regimini militantis ecclesiae. After Xavier left Japan for China in 1551, his successors had a virtual monopoly of Christian missions in Japan for about 50 years. The origin of this monopoly lay in the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494. The Portuguese and Spanish crowns under papal supervision divided the world map in two, setting the dividing

Fig. 1.1 A girl looks out to see the Portuguese priests and merchants. Screen (six-fold): Nanban byōbu (detail), School of Kanō Mitsunobu.

line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands.⁸ This and other ensuing treaties entrusted the military conquest and Christianization of the West Indies to the Spanish royal patronage (patronato real), and the East Indies to the Portuguese royal patronage (padroado real). Under the enthusiastic leadership of the devout Catholic crowns, the Portuguese sailed to the ports of Africa, India, the Moluccas, Malacca, Macao, and Bahia and established outpost colonies of the East Indies (O Estado da Índia). Newly “discovered” Japan belonged to this Portuguese padroado even though Portugal would never colonize it, as it lay very far from Europe and boasted aggressive military power.⁹ Papal bulls continued to ensure that the Society of Jesus under Portuguese padroado would be the only order to work in Japan until 1608.¹⁰ Under these privileges, the early Jesuits in Japan developed a unique mission, experimenting with their method of persuasion and accommodation, rather than the more common forced conversions of the conquistadores.¹¹ This Jesuit “way of proceeding” set perimeters on their dealings with Shinto-Buddhist women and Kirishitan women converts.¹² The Jesuits had already established this pattern of mission when the mendicant orders under Spanish patronato from the Philippines arrived in Japan much later.

The Christian Century corresponds also to the turbulent transitional period toward the unification of Japan. When the Jesuits arrived, the nation had been in a century-long state of civil war known as the sengoku period, or the period of warring nations.¹³ The authority of the imperial house had long been lost to the military rule of the Kamakura government (1221–1334) of the Hōjō, and then to the Muromachi government (1334–1573) of the Ashikaga. Since the War of Ōnin (1467–77), the Muromachi government itself lost control. The nation was divided into more than sixty feudal kingdoms, where feudal lords fought among themselves to acquire larger fiefs.¹⁴ Gekokujō phenomena of the lower usurping the higher became widespread and loyalty to one’s lord could no longer be assumed. Women lived precariously, both physically and socially, because family patriarchs arranged and rearranged marriage and concubinage for strategic alliances. Christianity offered women an alternative concept of family. Some women who appear in this book chose perpetual celibacy, and some of these left their biological families and lived in women’s communities.

In the mid-sixteenth century, as the Ashikaga shogunate was breathing its last, a series of military strongmen became de facto unifiers of Japan. The first half of the Christian Century fell under the rule of two Azuchi-Momoyama unifiers, namely, Oda Nobunaga (1534–82) and Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–98). Both saw value in the Portuguese trade, especially in European weapons to enhance their military capabilities. In their wars of conquest of the states, they defeated all entities that could potentially pose threats to their domination. They destroyed powerful Shinto-Buddhist temples, which boasted their own military troops with the financial backings from their adherents. These economic, political, and religious tides worked favorably for the still obscure Jesuit mission, and between 1549 and 1585, the Jesuit missionaries gained gradual recognition from the unifiers, witnessing steady church growth. Notable conversions of the Kirishitan daimyō, such as Ōtomo Sōrin Francisco, Ōmura Sumitada Bartolomeu, and Arima Harunobu Protásio, as well as some of the women in this book, including Hibiya Monica (Part 1) and Justa of Nagasaki (Part 4), occurred during this period. There were also localized persecutions of Kirishitans. The wife of Ōtomo Sōrin Francisco, alias Jezebel, rejected Christianity and became a formidable Shinto-Buddhist leader against the Jesuits (Part 2).

Nobunaga was assassinated in 1582, and Hideyoshi received the title kampaku (imperial regent) from Emperor Ōgimachi in 1585. Hideyoshi immediately began to assert his power as the sole unifier of Japan. By then the Kirishitan population had grown noticeably, to about 240,000,¹⁵ and Hideyoshi may have perceived a threat of Portuguese colonialism through the Jesuit mission. He issued the first nationwide Edict of Expulsion of Padres in 1587. Even though he never strictly enforced the Edict, the climate was steadily changing against the Jesuit mission and their Kirishitan followers. Hideyoshi fought and lost his own disastrous colonial campaigns in Korea between in 1592 and 1597; these invasions finally ended with his death in 1598. Then Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616) assumed power as the last unifier. He won the historic Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, established the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603, and then moved the seat of the government from Kyoto to Tokyo (Edo). Though the Edict was still in effect, the Kirishitan population increased to about 300,000 by 1600. Such noblewomen as Hosokawa Tama Gracia, a daughter of Nobunaga’s assassin, Kiyohara Ito Maria, and Kyōgoku Maria (all Part 3) as well as Naitō Julia (Part 1), were converted and became important Kirishitan catechists during this period.

In the last quarter of the Christian Century, political and social hostility toward the Portuguese presence and the Kirishitan movement escalated in a nationwide persecution. While the Tokugawa shogunate was establishing itself, it still allowed Portuguese trade and Kirishitan activities for a decade. As the government adopted Neo-Confucianism as the state ideology, it began to carry out anti-Christian policy more systematically and ordered the feudal lords to eradicate Kirishitans among their subjects. Meanwhile, the monopoly of the Jesuits under the Portuguese padroado gradually eroded. After the Spanish conquest of the Philippines in 1565 and the annexation of Portugal by Spain in 1580, the missionaries under the Spanish patronato began seeking possibilities of extending the Spanish way of Christianizing (and colonizing) to Japan. This led to many negotiations on the European scene and many conflicts in the mission fields of the East Indies. The missionaries under the jurisdiction of Spain entered Japan, first illegally, beginning with the Dominicans in 1592, followed by the Franciscans in 1594, and Augustinians in 1602. Although these late-arriving mendicants gained new converts, the majority of the Kirishitan communities would remain under the care of the Jesuits through the end of the Christian Century.¹⁶ In 1608 the mendicants obtained a reversal of the papal bull, which allowed all orders to labor in Japan. This meant that they began their work against the tide, when the Kirishitan persecution had become intensified. A few Dutch and English traders arrived in Japan in 1600, hoping to win the favor of the Japanese lords over their Catholic enemies.¹⁷ Needless to say, bitter intra-Christian antagonism between the Portuguese Jesuits and Spanish friars as well as Catholics and Protestants elevated Japanese authorities’ caution against foreign invasions.

In the aftermath of an incident involving Kirishitan daimyō Arima Harunobu João, the Tokugawa reissued the Edict of Expulsion of Padres in 1612, marking the beginning of the end of the Christian Century. In 1613 the major city officials registered, arrested, and tortured European missionaries and prominent Kirishitan leaders as dangerous elements. In the Great Expulsion of 1614, the Tokugawa forcefully deported hundreds of these, including Naitō Julia and her community of women catechists, out of Japan. The Tokugawa’s final victory over the remnants of Toyotomi supporters in the Battle of Osaka natsu no jin in 1615 ended the last of the sengoku wars. In order to establish the long-awaited stable nation without interference from outside, the government issued the Edict of Sakoku (closing of the nation) to all Portuguese, Spanish, and English contacts and entry. It also banned all Japanese travels in and out of the nation beginning in 1616. It enforced the ban of Christianity, and after the Amakusa-Shimabara Peasant Uprising in 1637–38, it took extreme measures of suppression of all things and persons Kirishitan. In the fierce persecution, many women and men died as martyrs, others apostatized (korobi), while stil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• PART 1: NUNS
• PART 2: WITCHES
• PART 3: WOMEN CATECHISTS
• PART 4: SISTERS
• 15 Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index