Paper short abstract:

Barreto’s 1591 Japanese miscellany has a “Dialogue on the Instruments of the Passion” which shows sophisticated religious (mis)understandings: poetics learned from Japanese ballads create a trance state of aesthetic engagement, while features of Japanese grammar sabotage classic Catholic tropes.

Paper long abstract:

Manoel Barreto's 1591 Japanese miscellany contains a "Dialogue on the Instruments of the Passion" which shows what sophisticated religious (mis)understandings the Jesuits and their converts had achieved after a decade of Valignano's cultural policies. Featuring the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, the dialogue sublimates maternal and erotic energies in turn while fetishizing the usual series of violent Instruments, but it appropriates rhetoric from the martial ballads which the Jesuits were reading for language study: because Japanese grammar has no person, skillful phrasing can cause subjectivity to shift kaleidoscopically with the flow of the text, and the Virgin's opening speech shows especial skill in this regard. However, honorifics are the primary indicator of verbal subjects, so the usual double-entendre on filho "son (of God / of Mary)" misfires: Jesus is to the Virgin both superior and inferior. This failure is supplemented with Portuguese marginalia and catachresms like uaga uonco Deus "my (honored) Child, Deus". Mary Magdalene's sado-masochism is presented with less success: the rich Japanese tradition of erotic double-entendre was apparently unknown here, for excessive literalism frequently produces comedy. The second half of the piece runs through the Instruments again in clinical fashion—cataloguing them as dōgu "implements", the word used for art objects in the tea ceremony—and here, the word muchi "whip" is replaced with disciplina, as if that word meant "whip": apparently a practice of self-flagellation, a prominent feature of seventeenth-century Japanese Christian protest, was already being taught as part of this devotion.