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.