Conquering Demons: The “Kirishitan,” Japan, and the World in Early Modern Japanese Literature by Jan C. Leuchtenberger (review)

Jan C. Leuchtenberger’s book is an important contribution to the recently reopened discussion of the European Christian mission in Japan in the seventeenth century and its impact on the culture of Japan. The conventional view held by historians such as George Elison, as expressed in his 1988 book Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan, was that little to nothing remained of Christianity after the missionaries were expelled from Japan in 1639. Christianity was, according to Elison, virtually eradicated from the country. He writes: “the sum of [the missionaries’] cultural contribution to Japan was nil. … [T]he Christians were exterminated by the despotic Tokugawa regime. … The Christians’ heroism could not avert this fate: they could do nothing to arrest this force, and were ground up before it.”¹ If Elison had been speaking of the religious repercussions of the Christian mission or had referred to the destruction of a free and open community of Christian believers, his position would be more tenable, but he denies that Christianity had made any cultural contribution to Japan.

This position until recently has been the generally accepted understanding of the so-called “Christian century.”² It has been assumed that while missionary activity flourished in Japan for a time in the late 1500s, virtually all Japanese Christians had been tortured and executed, had apostatized and reverted to their former Buddhist practices, or had gone into seclusion after 1640. Consequently, it is assumed that the missionaries’ efforts produced no lasting results. This assumption was also put forward in 1991 by Elison in The Cambridge History of Japan, in which he stated that by 1644, after the last Jesuit missionaries had been either killed or had apostatized, Christianity was eradicated and was no longer of any importance in Japan.³

This view, however, has recently been questioned. In her 2009 book Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650, Haruko Nawata Ward focused on historical personages and events that had not been studied in any depth previously. Ward maintained that the Christian mission did have cultural and social impact on Japan and convincingly argued that the Jesuit mission was successful in ways long overlooked. Christianity, Ward concluded, had been instrumental in empowering women to make their own decisions about their lives and provided them with opportunities to exercise leadership in ministries of teaching, persuading, preaching, and works of mercy, all of which were perceived as a threat and a challenge to an increasingly Neo-Confucian society.⁴

Jan Leuchtenberger enters into this controversy with her book Conquering Demons: The “Kirishitan,” Japan, and the World in Early Modern Japanese Literature and demonstrates the importance of anti-Christian texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the culture of Japan. While acknowledging that “[b]y the early 1630s the ‘Kirishitan’ religion and its adherents appeared to have been eradicated,” Leuchtenberger points out that the 1637 Shimabara Rebellion “made it clearly evident that the foreign missionaries still held influence over their converts” (p. 2). What is more, that influence did not end with the Shimabara Rebellion but continued throughout the Tokugawa period, as is evident in the number of arrests of Christians that were made until late in the nineteenth century.

Leuchtenberger notes that while the individual “practicing Kirishitan may have disappeared from public view … the figure of the Kirishitan lived on for more than two centuries in pseudohistorical narratives that continually replayed his abjection and expulsion” (p. 2). These narratives were widely read, copied, and recopied “in quantities large enough that more than 150 manuscript copies are still extant today” (p. 2). The narratives have long been known to historians, but Leuchtenberger puts them in a new context to reveal that the Kirishitan remained in the consciousness of the Japanese long after the missionaries had been expelled. In...