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Cultural (in)commensurability between Catholic Europe and Japan in the early modern period, c.1582-c.1614 : the buke community, Jesuits, and the Tenshō Embassy
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Florence : European University Institute, 2025
EUI; HEC; PhD Thesis
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SHIMADA, Takuya, Cultural (in)commensurability between Catholic Europe and Japan in the early modern period, c.1582-c.1614 : the buke community, Jesuits, and the Tenshō Embassy, Florence : European University Institute, 2025, EUI, HEC, PhD Thesis - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/92860
Abstract
The Jesuit Mission in Japan (1549-1639) and the so-called Tenshō Embassy (1582-1590) – the first (Catholic) European-Japanese direct encounters in history – have been written conventionally and predominantly from European and/or missionary perspectives, based largely on Jesuit sources. Such an approach has prevailed despite the clear cross-cultural nature of the encounters. This thesis offers a view from a Japanese standpoint, examining the question of cultural (in)commensurability through the Embassy and in the buke (warlord class)-Jesuit negotiation that resulted from 1614 in the Tokugawa shogunate’s expulsion of Jesuits and other (Catholic) Europeans from the country. The thesis discusses 1) the agency of the adolescent “legates” while in Italy in 1585, 2) their behavioural context through the buke’s traditional code in Japan, 3) the Jesuits’ “understanding” of the buke’s political ethics behind their missionary practices, 4) the fermentation of distrust in the Jesuits among the buke community from the 1600s, and 5) ethos and pathos that constituted the fabric of the buke-ruled society. Overall, the thesis proposes the view that a certain habitus – a teleological(-theological) manner of perception, reasoning, and action – rendered the Jesuits (and the Embassy’s hosts generally) incapable of acknowledging Japanese alterity per se and of building a good rapport with buke rulers. The buke community’s political-cultural forces, which were organically grounded on historical events and practices but were interpreted by the Jesuits rather superficially and wilfully, proved to be vital in the way the buke-Jesuit negotiation unfolded. Methodologically, the thesis offers a case study that demonstrates how the Jesuits constructed a unilateral knowledge – what may be called positive ignorance – of the Other in Japan for Europe and subsequent historiography. Filling the lacunae by complementing the Jesuits’ history with various buke members’, the thesis underscores the significance of the cultural (in)commensurability however much impalpable it may have been in history and historiography.
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Defence date: 23 June 2025
Examining Board: Prof. Giancarlo Casale (European University Institute); Prof. Angelo Cattaneo (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche; Istituto di Storia dell’Europa Mediterranea); Prof. Kiri Paramore (University College Cork); Prof. Lucy Riall (European University Institute)
Examining Board: Prof. Giancarlo Casale (European University Institute); Prof. Angelo Cattaneo (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche; Istituto di Storia dell’Europa Mediterranea); Prof. Kiri Paramore (University College Cork); Prof. Lucy Riall (European University Institute)
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Chapter 2 'Contextualising the “good manners” of the legates' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as an article 'Japanese context of the ‘good manners’ of the legates of the Tensho embassy in Italy (1585) : the Buke Kojitsu, the Ise, and Kyūshū' (2023) in the journal 'Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale'.