The Confusions of Idolatry: Rodrigo Vivero, Japan, and the Hapsburg Monarchy

Scholarly accounts of the European encounter with East Asia tend to emphasize the admiration that Europeans held for Chinese and Japanese culture and society, yet the period also exhibited powerful currents of Sinophobia and Japanophobia. In his account of a 1609 visit to Japan, the Mexican criollo Rodrigo de Vivero y Velasco presents an overwhelmingly positive vision of the Japanese that would help support his effort to broker a diplomatic agreement between the Hapsburg Monarchy and the Tokugawa shogunate. A careful reading of the text, nevertheless, reveals the presence of conflicting attitudes toward the Japanese, including a powerful Japanophobic undercurrent probably nurtured by Vivero's prior experience as interim governor of the Philippines. This essay explores how Vivero processes these conflicting attitudes in order to produce, later in life, an image of Japan as an exemplary foil to the Catholic Monarchy in both politics and piety.