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

In secondary sources on the history of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in early modern Japan, the most prominent figures generally have been the priests and the Japanese officials who either supported or opposed their efforts. When Japanese converts are mentioned individually in these accounts, they are usually the more politically prominent daimyo, such as Arima Harunobu, Ōmura Sumitada, and Takayama no Ukon, or those who left a written record on Christianity, such as Fabian Fucan. There is almost no mention of women in the conventional histories of the period, and the reader might be forgiven for thinking that the missionaries focused their efforts only on men. Primary Jesuit sources, however, contain many references to female converts, some of whom played significant roles in the missions' work. In Women Religious Leaders in Japan's Christian Century, 1549-1650, Haruko Nawata Ward introduces several women who figured prominently in support of or opposition to the Jesuit missions and argues for their importance not only to the missions but also in the context of political and ideological shifts in the early Tokugawa period. Ward claims that the leadership of the converts was indispensable to the proselytizing efforts of the Society and that this period was "the century of women's apostolic missions" (p. 11), when converts were able to use the tools available to them in both Catholic and Shinto-Buddhist traditions to carve out an autonomous space for their own religious practice and to exercise leadership in the instruction of others. The book brings together and contextualizes information about these women from a diffuse collection of Jesuit sources, and while some of the conclusions may range more broadly than the scope of the material can support, it is an important contribution to studies on the Jesuit missions and on women religious leaders in Japan.

Ward has mined several prominent Jesuit sources for references to their prominent female converts. These include Luis Frois's Historia de Japam; the Cartas, a collection of letters published by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century; and Francisco Colín's Labor Evangélica.¹ When available, she has also searched Japanese sources for information on the women, but in some cases these are so scarce that their full Japanese names remain unknown. Among the converts featured in the book are the daughter of a wealthy merchant of Sakai and a former Buddhist nun, as well as the more famous Tama Gracia Hosokawa and the daughter of Akechi Mitsuhide, adviser to and later enemy of Oda Nobunaga. Ward also gives considerable attention to the wife of the Kirishitan daimyo Ōtomo Yoshishige, a woman whom the Jesuits named "Jezebel" for her strong opposition to Christianity and to her husband s and other family members' conversions. In most cases, the Jesuit sources identified the women's religious affiliations before converting to Christianity, and one of the strengths of Ward's study is the addition of information about the sects they belonged to, as well as her analysis of how the women's training in various Shinto-Buddhist traditions may have affected their reception of Christianity and the activities they pursued either in support of or in opposition to the Jesuit mission.

In the introduction, Ward points out that little has been written about these women until now because of concerns about a lack of primary sources. In fact, there appear to be no extant sources written by the women, with the result that nearly all of the information on them comes from letters the Jesuit priests wrote to Rome, and other works based on those letters. This situation need not preclude writing about the women as significant figures in the Jesuit mission, and the book offers an important look at Jesuit reliance on female converts in Japan despite restrictions in the Constitution (i.e., the internal regulations of the Society of Jesus) on working regularly with women. The reader might question, however, whether the Jesuit sources "provide a cornucopia...