A Christian Samurai: The Trials of Baba Bunkō by William J. Farge (review)

Since Martin Scorsese's Silence was released in 2016, and the hidden Christian sites in the Nagasaki region were registered as a World Cultural Heritage site in 2018, the history of the Catholic Church in early modern Japan has received much attention within and without the country. Pope Francis' visit to Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Tokyo in 2019 spurred this momentum.

Prior to the recent upsurge of the general attention to the early Christian history in Japan, we had already begun to see stimulating new perspectives applied to its studies—women's history, art history, and history from below, among others—beyond the area's traditional and conventional scopes and methods based mainly on primary sources left by European missionaries.

In William Farge's Christian Samurai: Trial of Baba Bunkō, we can see another new approach to the study of Christianity in early modern Japan. His work is innovative in terms of the subject to explore and the method to apply. His defense of approach is convincing in historical as well as historiographical senses.

Farge focuses on Baba Bunkō (1718–59), a former samurai who, after renouncing his samurai status, wrote and lectured critiques of contemporary politics, society, and religions, but especially of the Tokugawa government. Bunkō was eventually arrested to be executed for his activities. No other historians have discussed Bunkō as Christian (or hidden Christian), nor has he ever appeared in the history of Christianity in early modern Japan. He has been an unknown figure for Western scholars; his studies in Japanese are very limited.

Farge tries to explore this little-known figure—his personal history, his writings, and his "Christian" nature. Why did he have to do so? He attempted "to take a fresh look at the history of Christianity in early modern Japan and to re-evaluate the long-term impact of Catholic missionary activity in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century" (p. xvii). In particular, he challenges the conventional assumption that there were no Christian writings in the eighteenth century due to the persecution by the Tokugawa government. Generally speaking, the most convincing way to challenge a historical assumption is to present evidence that cannot be explained by the assumption. Baba Bunkō was nothing but such evidence for Farge to overturn the old view and introduce new one.

This is not an easy thing, however. For, first and foremost, written materials to show Bunkō was Christian are limited. Bunkō never explicitly confessed his Christian faith; there were instead several words in his writing that were "unfamiliar to anyone who was not a Christian" (p. 12). Relying on these words and carefully disclosing their associated implications, Farge delicately yet boldly constructs the foundation of his thesis that Baba Bunkō was indeed Christian and all of his works must be read in Christian context.

Farge explains as follows. Bunkō criticizes the "coat-of-arms" of the emperor and the shogun as concrete causes for the moral decline of the time, saying, "Such crests are pointless, and they look foolish. Both crests should be abolished and the designs for them redone. They have brought unexpected misfortune rather than protection" (p. 31). Then Bunkō proceeds to claim there is another crest that is "more worthy of respect," "that shows the body of a person" which he calls "the crest of the Christian Champion" of the uprising in Shimabara (1637–38) (p. 31). That crest was also "the principal image of the Christian Lord of Heaven" (ibid.). Farge maintains that the crest to which Bunkō refers is "the battle flag of the Shimabara rebellion," and continues,

This battle flag does not literally show the figure of the body of a person, as Bunkō indicated. It is rather the representation of a chalice and a round "host," or wafer of bread—the objects of the sacrament of the Eucharist used in the Catholic Mass. … To the eyes...