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  • Présences occidentales au Japon. Du «siècle chrétien» à la réouverture du XIXe siècle by Henri Bernard-Maître, Pierre Humbertclaude, Maurice Prunier
  • Paul Rule
Présences occidentales au Japon. Du «siècle chrétien» à la réouverture du XIXe siècle. By Henri Bernard-Maître, Pierre Humbertclaude, and Maurice Prunier. Edition compiled and presented by Christophe Marquet. [Histoire.] (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf. 2011. Pp. 432. €35,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-204-08525-0.)

This useful collection consolidates the works (mostly long articles) of Henri Bernard-Maître, S.J., and the Marianist Pierre Humbertclaude (with some comments on art by Maurice Prunier) on early Christianity in Japan. They were written and published at a very difficult time—the early years of the Sino-Japanese war, many in publications now hard to access. Some were later republished, but all are now reproduced here with striking illustrations in a single volume. Together, they provide a valuable history of the introduction, growth, and virtual extermination of Christianity in Japan and of early Western intellectual influences on Japan.

Almost all the items included are works of synthesis, often in the form of lectures, rather than based on original archival research, which was to be the case in the postwar years, especially in the work of Charles Boxer. The later work of Bernard-Maître (or Henri Bernard as he styled himself at this time) when expulsion from China enabled him to do serious archival research in Europe was deeper but less extensive and mostly on China. This reviewer remembers as a graduate student encountering him frequently in the Jesuit Archives in Rome making copious notes on tiny sheets of rice paper—as assiduous then as in his prime. The bibliographies alone of these articles will still reveal many treasures to the researcher.

However, both Bernard and Humbertclaude brought special insights to their work on Japan: extensive missionary experience and hence empathetic exploration of the motivation and mind-sets of their missionary predecessors; and constant interaction with Japanese scholars (and, in the case of Bernard, also Chinese scholars).

In many respects, their historical judgments still stand up to scrutiny. Bernard’s nuanced account of the multifaceted collapse of Christianity in Japan is still valuable, except perhaps for his obsession, which he brought from his studies of Chinese thought, with the influence of Zhuxi-style Confucianism—“the cause of the closure of Japan,” as he titles one of his 1941 lectures. This branch of neo-Confucianism he thought irretrievably materialistic, atheistic, irreconcilable with [End Page 398] Christian transcendence and spirituality, and responsible more than Buddhism for the hostility of Japan’s rulers to Christianity. Right or wrong, however, he challenges head on the superficial “dispute des moines” interpretation of many modern scholars. Real and substantial differences were at stake.

The work is divided into three sections on “the Christian Century” (not a term used by either of the main authors), “Jesuit Publications in Japan,” and “the French Presence before the Reopening of the Nineteenth Century.” As the main title suggests, the emphasis throughout is on Western influences—religious, scientific, and artistic—on Japan. Particularly important are the contributions by Bernard on the influence of Chinese translations and Jesuit treatises in Chinese in Japan after as well as before the closure of Japan and Humbertclaude’s on the influence of French ideas before 1854. Both should have put paid to notions of absolute intellectual isolation that persisted long after this period, or the version that admitted the influence of “Dutch learning” but no others.

It should be clear, then, that the republication of these works after seventy years will draw attention again to neglected problems and insights as well as reminding scholars of the twenty-first century of their debt to their predecessors. The only drawback is that they remain in their original French, but inevitable no doubt in a publication with financial assistance from the Maison franco-japonaise de Tokyo. An English translation, however, would have been more accessible to Japanese and Chinese scholars and to Western ones who, exhausted by their struggle with Asian languages, increasingly lack literacy in major European languages. [End Page...

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