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.