women religious leaders in japan's christian century, 1549-1650 (review)

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

Jan Leuchtenberger

Monumenta Nipponica, Volume 65, Number 2, 2010, pp. 402-406 (Article)

Published by Sophia UniversityDOI: 10.1353/mni.2010.0001

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402 Monumenta Nipponica 65:2 (2010)

century” (p. 132). Here and elsewhere in the book, Gerhart makes the important observation that funerals of the Heian period elites were fully esoteric in their orientation and that Pure Land funerals of later periods, such as Hōnen’s mentioned here, and even Zen funerals, exhibited considerable esoteric influence, yet this insight is not incorporated into the work in a consistent way.

Another interesting and surprising theme that Gerhart provides evidence for again and again is the incredible malleability and flexibility of the rituals of death and memorial rites. For instance, the actual duration of the forty-nine- (“seven-sevens”-) day memorial services could be stretched or truncated depending upon seasonal or calendrical demands, geo-mantic concerns, and a whole host of other factors. Much of the timing, the manner of disposal of the corpse, and other details of the ritual were left to the discretion of the mourners, officiants, and “outside” consultants such as Yin-Yang diviners. Similarly, the extremely valuable point that Japanese funerals for the laity came to be modeled on monastic funerals is stressed at several junctures. This is a development that deserves a great deal of at-tention and emphasis, and, while it is beyond the scope of Gerhart’s study, one hopes that in future research, scholars might take up the theme of the monasticization of the dead across Buddhist cultures. Clearly, the Japanese dead are seen as monks and nuns, and this has long been the case. Was this so in other places? Gerhart suggests a great many “areas for further investigation” in her narrative, and this could be added to the list.

While no book is free of errors, in this fine work they are mercifully few. Still, I suppose it is part of the duty of a reviewer to mention those that are noted. One might raise minor quibbles concerning some translations, for example, “proper words” for hōgo, where “homily” or “sermon” would surely be more appropriate (p. 69), or “repose of the dead” for bodai, where this reader would have wanted to see “enlightenment.” Other small mistakes of an editorial nature can be found occasionally. Inagaki Hisao is frequently shortened to Hisao, i.e., using the author’s given name rather than his surname (p. 93, note 28; p. 94, note 41; and elsewhere). Also, in the bibliography, Ryūichi Abé’s book The Weaving of Mantra: Kūkai and the Construction of Esoteric Buddhist Discourse is attributed to Stanley Abe. Overall, these are minor concerns. The book is truly a welcome and epoch-making contribution to the study of religion, ritual, and material culture in Japan’s medieval period.

Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650. By Haruko Nawata Ward. Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009. 422 pages. Hardcover £65.00.

Jan LeuchtenbergerUniversity of Puget Sound

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

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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 informa-tion about these women from a diffuse collection of Jesuit sources, and while some of the con-clusions 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 for-mer 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 consid-erable 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 of the thoughts and lived realities of these individual women” (p. 16). Ward acknowledges that the women were “quoted” (p. 16) in Jesuit letters

1 Luis Frois, Historia de Japam, ed. José Wicki, 5 vols. (Lisbon: Biblioteca National de Lisboa, 1976–1984); Cartas que os Padres y Irmãos da Companhia de Jesus excreverão dos Reynos de Iapão e China aos da mesma Companhia da India e Europa, desdo anno de 1549 ate o de 1580 (Evora, 1598), facsimile edi-tion, 2 vols. (Tenri Central Library, 1972); and Francisco Colín, Labor Evangélica, ministerios apostolicos de los obreros de la Compañia de Jesús, fundacion, y progressos de su providencia en las Islas Filipinas (Madrid, 1663), repr., 3 vols., ed. Pablo Pastells (Barcelona: Henrich, 1900).



in order to demonstrate the success of the mission in Japan, but she argues that, “while one must remember this Jesuit apologetic tendency, these women’s words themselves can be trusted as accurate, because the Jesuits were under no obligation to report such obscure matters to their Roman headquarters” (p. 16). While there may have been no obligation, there certainly was incentive to write favorably about the missions’ successes. Letters sent to Rome by the mission superiors and by individual priests were written with the knowledge that they would be read by church officials there and possibly translated for distribution to missions in other countries. The same letters were edited further when they were prepared for broader publication in the two sources Ward uses most, the Cartas and Frois’s Historia. Under such circumstances, it seems optimistic to treat quoted passages in Historia as records of a particular woman’s “own voice” (p. 257). While Ward regularly comments on the me-diating influence of the Jesuit fathers on what we can know about these women, a tendency to also refer to their “voices,” or to see a “true identity” in the compilation of those sources, can be confusing to the reader.

The book is divided into four parts according to the primary roles played by these women in the Jesuit missions. In part 1, titled “Nuns,” Ward highlights Hibiya Monica, a daughter of a Sakai merchant who chose pious seclusion after a forced marriage thwarted her vow of chastity, and Naitō Julia, the leader of a group of women known as the Miyako no bikuni, or the nuns of Miyako. The two chapters on this group and their leader include information about the bikuni that has been absent from other English sources, and they fill an important gap in scholarship on converts of the Jesuits. In 1600, former Jōdo abbess and Kirishitan convert Naitō Julia formed a community of women who lived together and took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. While in Kyoto, they did not live in seclusion, but served as catechists who were particularly useful to the Jesuit order because they had access to women that the priests did not. As Ward notes, it was a unique group that benefited from the guid-ance of the Jesuit fathers and followed the monastic model, but was not officially recognized as a monastic order because of prohibitions against female orders in the Jesuit organization. When the missionaries were expelled from Japan in 1614, the Miyako no bikuni were among those who went to the Philippines, where the group abandoned proselytizing in favor of a cloistered life, for a variety of reasons including linguistic and cultural barriers. Of particu-lar interest in this section on the Miyako no bikuni is Ward’s suggestion that Fabian Fucan’s Myōtei mondō, a treatise on Christianity presented as a dialogue between a noble Kirishitan woman and a noble Jōdo follower, was actually a manual for female catechists written with the Miyako no bikuni in mind.

Though the second part of the book is titled “Witches,” all four chapters in it are about one “witch,” the wife of Ōtomo Yoshishige, known by the Jesuits as “Jezebel.” This woman is the only one featured in the book who did not convert to Christianity, but her strong opposition to the conversion of her husband, one of the most famous and devoted converts, was a thorn in the side of the Jesuit mission, as is clear from the many references to her in the letters and in Frois’s Historia. Ward presents Jezebel as another example of a strong female religious and political leader—only one who defended the Shinto-Buddhist tradition against Chris-tianity. Though her Japanese first name is unknown, she was a daughter of the Nata family, hereditary priests of the Nata Hachiman shrine, and Ward traces some of her opposition to Christianity to her family’s long tradition as caretakers and priests of a shrine linked to the protection of not only Kyushu but all of Japan. Jezebel’s role as a hereditary priestess of the shrine, along with her support of Kumano bikuni and Shugendō practitioners, all marked her as a practitioner of the occult in the eyes of the Jesuits, and therefore a particularly evil


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influence for whom they reserved some of their most bitter criticism in their letters. Ward analyzes this antagonistic relationship and the Jesuits’ role in Ōtomo’s divorce of Jezebel in light of contemporary ideas on witches and spirit possession, as well as the Jesuits’ own teachings on marriage, to draw a more nuanced picture of the woman than has been avail-able in Jesuit sources until now.

The final two parts of the book are titled “Women Catechists” and “Sisters,” and both offer pictures of a number of women whose names appear frequently in Jesuit primary sources, but who have rarely figured in secondary research on the period. These include Kyōgoku Maria and Catarina of Tanba in part 3, and the Sisters of the Misericórdia and the Marian Confrarias in part 4. By far the most famous of the women catechists, and perhaps the only female convert who has received as much attention as the men, is Tama Gracia Hosokawa. Jesuit and later Japanese sources paint Gracia as a patient and submissive wife who suffered in her marriage to an avowed enemy of the Christian missionaries. Her death in the siege of her family’s home during the Battle of Sekigahara drew more attention to her plight and led to several hagiographic and romantic accounts of her life by both Jesuit and Japanese authors. In several chapters devoted to her story, Ward tries to untangle the images of the martyred Kirishitan and long-suffering wife from earlier Jesuit references made before her death, and she further examines the dilemma of the Jesuit fathers who wanted to support a devout follower without angering the powerful officials close to her husband. Ward argues that the image of the submissive wife created by the Jesuits did not truly reflect Gracia’s situation, but that it was perpetuated because it fit the contemporary European ideal of a good woman while also allowing the priests to avoid offending Gracia’s husband, who they believed had changed his mind and could help support the missions.

In a chapter on the aftermath of Gracia’s death at the end of part 3, Ward inserts a section about the influence of Christianity on Japanese culture and expands on an assertion she made in the introduction about the effect of the Kirishitan women’s religious activities on Tokugawa policies during the early part of the seventeenth century. She claims that “the shift in politico-religious ideology in the first half of the seventeenth century and Japan’s total rejection of Christianity was caused largely by the unprecedented apostolate of Kirishitan women” (p. 289). She further explains that the move to a government sup-ported by Neo-Confucian ideology meant that the freedoms the women enjoyed and their leadership could not be tolerated. The expulsion of the Miyako no bikuni was, in Ward’s view, a reaction to the threat the women posed to the Tokugawa, and this and other actions against the Christian converts and women in particular led to the Tokugawa taking measures to “suppress all women’s activism for more than 200 years” (p. 289). The Miyako no bikuni were not the only Japanese converts to be expelled with the missionaries (Takayama no Ukon was also expelled and died in the Philippines), and Jesuit sources do not clearly present the fathers’ views on why the group of women was expelled. Ward does not offer any Japanese sources to support her claim for extraordinary political influence on the part of the women, nor does she engage available research on Tokugawa ideology or on the religious and political issues behind the ban on Christianity. In view of this, it is dif-ficult to see how such a conclusion was reached. Though Ward has certainly shown that the women played a larger role in the Christian missions than they have received credit for until now, the question of their influence on Tokugawa policy appears to fall outside of the scope of the book.

The greater part of the book is devoted to reconstructing the religious lives of a number of women who played influential roles in the spread of Christianity in the early modern



period, and in that endeavor it succeeds. By mining Jesuit sources for diffuse references to the women and then placing their religious practice and ministries in the context of their own training in the Shinto-Buddhist tradition, Ward has succeeded in giving a more nuanced picture of their relationship with Christianity and of their roles as religious leaders. Though some of its conclusions are more ambitious than the material can support, the study offers important new perspectives on the religious lives of women in this period and on the role they played in the Jesuit missions.

Makoto und Aufrichtigkeit: Eine Begriffs- und Diskursgeschichte. By Gerhard Bierwirth. Munich: Iudicium, 2009. 361 pages. Softcover €40.00.

Peter FlueckigerPomona College

Makoto—interpreted variously as sincerity, directness, spontaneity, authenticity, or purity of motive—is often considered a core value of Japanese culture and central to, among other things, Shinto, Japanese poetry, and the ethos of the samurai. In Makoto und Aufrichtigkeit, Gerhard Bierwirth calls this idea into question by examining the multifaceted discourse on makoto that took place in the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, including the framing of this term in relation to the equally complex notion of “sincerity” imported to Japan from the West. He argues that any particular understanding of makoto needs to be seen as histori-cally bound, making it meaningless to speak of the term’s “true meaning” or to associate it with any timeless notion of Japanese culture. With this book, Bierwirth offers a critique of a certain view of cultural keywords, one that sees such words as having stable meanings transparently understood by cultural insiders, while at the same time possessing a radical untranslatability that makes them serve as markers of cultural difference. What such a view overlooks, and what Bierwirth’s approach brings to the forefront, is how such terms have been actively constructed and contested in the service of a wide range of ideologies in differ-ent historical contexts. Seen in this light, terms like makoto appear more as sites of conflict than as expressions of a unified culture.

Before entering into his main discussion of the treatment of makoto in Japan, Bierwirth presents an outline of the discourse on “sincerity” in early modern Europe, which he de-scribes as incorporating two basic paradigms for understanding the meaning of the term. The first, which he labels the “idealistic” variant of this concept, stresses the purification of the inner self through isolation from and renunciation of a corrupt world; in this view, sincerity encompasses simplicity, spontaneity, and immediacy. The second, “pragmatic,” paradigm is instead interpersonal in orientation, emphasizing communication and trust-worthiness. Despite the conflict between these two versions of sincerity, Bierwirth argues that they should be seen as dialectically related, not merely opposed, as the more one type is emphasized, the greater the demand becomes for the other. The internal contradictions of this dialectical structure are connected, he writes, to a new conception of the individual within a deracinated capitalist society in which there arises a need not only for the defense of an authentic private interiority, but also for the means to reach out to and establish bonds with others who are encountered as strangers.


women religious leaders in japan's christian century, 1549-1650 (review)

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