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- Convenor:
-
Patrick Schwemmer
(Musashi University)
Send message to Convenor
- Stream:
- Performing Arts
- Location:
- Torre B, Piso 2, Sala T5
- Sessions:
- Friday 1 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the turn from insurrection to martyrdom in medieval Japanese Christianity, as depicted in the Japanese-language performing arts of the Jesuit mission, in anti-Christian kabuki and puppet plays in Japan, and in nostalgic "Japan plays" produced in the early-modern Catholic world.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores the turn from insurrection to martyrdom in medieval Japanese Christian reactions to the persecution, as depicted in the Japanese-language performing arts produced by the Jesuit mission at the time, in anti-Christian kabuki and puppet plays in Japan, and in nostalgic "Japan plays" produced in the Catholic world throughout the early modern period. Before the strategy had solidified of preparing parishioners for martyrdom, European missionaries initially reacted to Hideyoshi's expulsion edict by flirting with a strategy of dual Iberian invasion and Japanese Christian insurrection (Takase 1977). Schwemmer presents a previously-unstudied miracle story set in Japan, written in Japanese in a Heike-like ballad style, and centred around themes common to hagiographies of the Reconquista and the Conquest of the New World—and moreover bearing a postscript by the ranking Jesuit which explicitly situates it as propaganda in support of the planned insurrection. Although this plan was ultimately abandoned in favour of martyrdom, the charge of insurrection is among the most prominent levelled at the missionaries in anti-Christian kabuki and puppet plays in early modern Japan. As Leuchtenberger shows, this image of European interventionism had an enduring influence upon the formation of Japanese community consciousness, from the Tokugawa shogunate to the present day. Finally, back in Europe, the image of Japan also endured: a vast corpus of plays, written and performed as early as the reception of the Tenshō embassy in the 1580s and right on down to the nineteenth century, re-imagined Japanese Christendom in a variety of ways depending upon the needs of various communities. Ōba introduces the Japan plays, with attention to a previously-unstudied composition of 1665, entitled "Victor the Japanese." The eponymous Noda Gensuke Victor is a peripheral figure in contemporaneous accounts of the first major martyrdom in 1597, but here he is an old man who argues with a younger interlocutor—as in the comedies of Terence—over the moral merits of taking up arms against the tyrant Hideyoshi versus the 'suicide attack' of martyrdom. In all three cases, the performing arts are the medium through which a community contemplates the encounter between Latin Christendom and Japan.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 1 September, 2017, -Paper short abstract:
A 1591 Vatican collection of medieval Japanese Christian literature opens with a ballad in a Heike-like style, which I show is the remnant of a literary strategy that accompanied the Jesuits' abortive plan to fight Hideyoshi using Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese Christian troops.
Paper long abstract:
A 1591 Vatican collection of medieval Japanese Christian literature opens with a ballad about peasants in the domain of a Christian daimyō, who discover a cross miraculously embedded in a tree they were cutting for firewood. I show that this piece is the remnant of a literary strategy which accompanied the Jesuits' abortive plan, in the wake of Hideyoshi's promulgation of the first expulsion edict in 1587, to fight for control of Kyūshū using Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese Christian troops. The same story appears in Fróis' 1590 annual letter, but there the order of events has been cleaned up; rather, the story shows every sign of having first been drafted in Japanese. This is interesting because it also bears a postscript by the ranking Jesuit, Coelho, which situates the events described as God's call to action in the face of persecution. While this story was being written, Coelho was desperately trying to secure the participation of various Iberian and Japanese allies in his military plan, including the daimyō in whose domain the cross was found, Arima Harunobu. When the peasants show the cross to Harunobu, the Japanese version depicts him as stubborn and unbelieving, while elevating the peasants' understanding by using honorifics on them and humilifics on Harunobu. In fact, when Harunobu refused to join Coelho's military alliance, Coelho angrily pulled all Jesuit personnel out of his domains, so this subtext is significant for the way it inverts high and low and situates the Jesuits as arbiters of a Japanese community. In Iberia, the feast of the Finding of the Cross is associated with the Reconquista, and the Spanish royal family features it prominently in their artistic patronage. Overseas expansion was carried out under the same legal and theological justifications as the Reconquista, and in the Americas, too, natives are depicted finding crosses that grow miraculously from the land, as in the plays of Lope de Vega. Meanwhile in Japan, the Jesuits would promote stories of miraculous crosses at least three more times, each time in hopes of influencing various communities.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the turn from insurrection to martyrdom in medieval Japanese Christianity, as remembered in plays about Japan on the early-modern European Catholic stage.
Paper long abstract:
Iberian merchants and missionaries were expelled from Japan by the 1640s, but recent scholarship has shown how the enduring memory of the European other continued to shape Japanese community consciousness, as expressed in literature and political theory, from the Tokugawa period through the present day. Meanwhile, back in Europe, the image of Japan also remained central to the performance of community, especially in the Catholic world, where the diffusion of information from Southern Europe through the Hapsburg sphere made Japan a frequent subject of depiction in Jesuit school plays even in the Germanophone world (Hsia & Wimmer 2005, Takao 2016). Previous studies have focused on Japan plays depicting either conversion and religious patronage by elites (the so-called "mirror for princes"), or the moment of martyrdom, but this paper explores the space in between: like the sixteenth-century missionaries themselves, seventeenth-century playwrights also contemplated the possibility of resistance, up to and including armed insurgency, on the part of the embattled Japanese Christian community. Particularly illuminating in this connection is a previously-unstudied play staged by the monks of Munich in 1665, in which the Japanese Christian Victor, a minor figure in contemporary accounts of the 1597 martyrdom, argues in favour of insurrection against the "tyrant" Hideyoshi, though his interlocutor ultimately convinces him that martyrdom is morally preferable. First, we investigate the play's structural roots in the comedies of Terence, the transmission of historical data through published Jesuit letters and official Jesuit histories, and the moral theology of the "overthrow of tyrants" as developed by Jesuits like Juan de Marina. Then, we contextualise this piece among Japan plays of its time and place, with reference to playbills, libretti, diaries, and other performance records. In this way, we can see how information from global intelligence networks was reassembled to express a community consciousness centred on Japan as a sophisticated alien other or pure, primitive self. Its depiction here on the edge of fight or flight is doing a particular kind of work for the late-seventeenth-century southern Germanophone world.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the significance of the figure of the deceitful Christian conqueror in early-modern Japanese chapbooks, kabuki, and puppet plays, in the context of Japan's engagement with the West and of eighteenth century discourses on Japan and its place in the world.
Paper long abstract:
From around the time of the 1614 expulsion through the nineteenth century in Japan, anonymous texts chronicling the arrival and expulsion of the European missionaries circulated widely in manuscript despite censorship of works on Christianity. Though the narratives of the three main texts differ significantly in focus, they all paint an alarming picture of a Western enemy bent on the conquest of Japan from within. That enemy is the Nanbanjin, a kind of all-purpose Western Other, who rejects a direct military invasion because Japan is protected by its own gods. Instead, he chooses to use religion to gain converts with the expectation that they would then help the Nanban armies conquer Japan and steal its wealth. This Christian/Western villain is not only confined to these tales; his influence is evident in kabuki and jôruri theater of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which a foreign villain tries to trick people into letting him conquer Japan, and shows up in the anti-Western discourse of the early nineteenth century. Significantly, all these discourses paint the same picture of the deceitful Christian bent on conquest from within, and there are virtually no other representations of Christians during this period. Though the actual missionaries abandoned any plans for insurrection early on, the potential threat they posed was fixed in the literary record of their stay as a lasting trauma. The endurance and popularity of these narratives and the tropes they contain point to the importance of the Christian figures in them as repositories for anxiety about Japan's vulnerability to influences and powers beyond its borders. This paper examines the significance of the figure of the deceitful Christian conqueror in the context of Japan's engagement with the West and of eighteenth century discourses on Japan and its place in the world.