Women Religious Leaders in Japan's Christian Century, 1549–1650 (review)

C. R. Boxer coined the term Christian Century and used it in the title of his book, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549–1650 (Berkeley, 1951). The use of this term, which refers to the years from the arrival of St. Francis Xavier in Kagoshima to the Tokugawa government's banning of trade relations with Catholic Europe, is controversial. George Elison in his book Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA, 1973, p. 1) and Ronald Toby in State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of the Tokugawa Bakufu (Stanford, 1991, p. 8) are of the opinion that the Christian mission in Japan had no lasting cultural influence. Scholars on the other side of the controversy—such as Robert Bellah in Tokugawa Religion: The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan (Glencoe, IL, 1957) and Andrew Ross in A Vision Betrayed: The Jesuits in Japan and China, 1542–1742 (New York, 1994)—claim a much more significant influence for Christianity in Japanese society.

Haruko Nawata Ward, in her well-researched book, enters into this controversy and argues that the Christian mission had a significant cultural and social impact on Japan. Through her detailed analysis of the activities of Christian women such as Hosokawa Tama Gracia (1563–1600), Ward provides strong evidence to show that the Jesuit mission was successful in ways that have been overlooked by historians. She convincingly argues that Christianity empowered women to make their own decisions about their lives: to take vows of celibacy as nuns or to choose their own marriage partners. The Christian community gave women opportunities to exercise leadership in ministries of teaching, persuading, preaching, and works of mercy, all of which was perceived as a threat in an increasingly neo-Confucian society (see p. 15).

The author also introduces the reader to Buddhist women leaders, such as the wife of Ōtomo Yoshishige Sōorin (1530–87), the daimyo of Bungo. Queen Ōtomo, known to the Jesuit missionaries and Christians as "Lady Jezebel," was the principal leader of the anti-Christian force in Bungo. Ward discusses the toleration showed by some Jesuits for Ōtomo's separation from her and his remarriage to his concubine in the hope of gaining Ōtomo's patronage and conversion. A thorough discussion of the canon law of the Catholic Church concerning marriage as well as Japanese marriage law allows the reader to understand the intricacies and difficulties of cultural adaptation in the period. Ward looks closely at the circumstances by which the policy of persecution in Japan gradually evolved. She explains more adeptly than many other historians the political and cultural reasons for the persecution, suggesting that the origins of the Tokugawa shogunate's ultimate rejection of Christianity lay to a great extent in the active ministry of Kirishitan (Christian) women. Their catechetical endeavors so threatened the Tokugawa neo-Confucian ideology that the regime had to suppress all women's activism (p. 289) until the new Meiji government finally lifted its ban of Christianity in 1873.

Ward's book invites readers to understand the Catholic mission in Japan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not simply as a European effort to proselytize a non-Christian land but as a catalyst that encouraged women to exert a powerful social, cultural, and political influence on their own people and government. This important book opens new directions for further research into women's history and invites a re-examination of the history of the Catholic Church in Japan.