Ideology and Christianity in Japan

Ideology and Christianity in Japan

Ideology and Christianity in Japan shows the major role played by Christianrelated discourse in the formation of early-modern and modern Japanese political ideology. The book traces the historical development of anti-Christian ideas in Japan from the banning of Christianity by the Tokugawa shogunate in the early 1600s, to the use of Christian and anti-Christian ideology in the construction of modern Japanese state institutions at the end of the 1800s. Kiri Paramore recasts the history of Christian-related discourse in Japan in a new paradigm showing its influence on modern thought and politics and demonstrates the direct links between the development of ideology in the modern Japanese state, and the construction of political thought in the early Tokugawa shogunate. Demonstrating hitherto ignored links in Japanese history between modern and early-modern, and between religious and political elements, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese history, religion and politics. Kiri Paramore is Assistant Professor in Japanese History at Leiden University, The Netherlands. He received his PhD in 2006 from the University of Tokyo.

Routledge/Leiden Series in Modern East Asian Politics and History Series editor: Rikki Kersten

Through addressing ideas about history and politics in the modern period, and by encouraging comparative and inter-disciplinary work amongst East Asian specialists, the Leiden Series on Modern East Asian History and Politics seeks to combine Area Studies’ focus on primary sources in the vernacular, with a distinct disciplinary edge. The Leiden Series focuses on philosophy, politics, political thought, history, the history of ideas, and foreign policy as they relate to modern East Asia, and will emphasise theoretical approaches in all of these fields. As well as single-authored volumes, edited or multi-authored submissions that bring together a range of country specialisations and disciplines are welcome. 1. Political Philosophy in Japan Nishida, the Kyoto school and co-prosperity Christopher Goto-Jones 2. The Left in the Shaping of Japanese Democracy Essays in Honour of J. A. A. Stockwin Edited by Rikki Kersten and David Williams 3. Re-Politicising the Kyoto School as Philosophy Christopher Goto-Jones 4. Ideology and Christianity in Japan Kiri Paramore

Ideology and Christianity in Japan

Kiri Paramore

First published 2009 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

© 2009 Kiri Paramore All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Paramore, Kiri. Ideology and Christianity in Japan / Kiri Paramore. p. cm. -- (Routledge/Leiden series in modern East Asian politics and history) Includes bibliographical references (p. ). 1. Christianity and politics – Japan – History. 2. Christianity – Japan – Controversial literature – History and criticism. 3. Japan – History – Tokugawa period, 1600–1868. 4. Japan – History – Meiji period, 1868–1912. I. Title. BR1306.P37 2009 275.2–dc22 2008025215 ISBN 0-203-88562-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–44356–3 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–88562–7 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–44356–2 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–88562–8 (ebk)

Contents

Key to abbreviations and notes on translation Introduction

vii 1

Uncovering the politics of anti-Christian discourse  3 Outline  5

1 Japanese Christian thought: doctrinal diversity or civilizational clash?

10

Habian: on the front line of ‘the clash of civilizations’  10 Currents of Japanese Christian thought: contrasting genres  12 Myōtei Mondō: creation, ethics and afterlife  13 Dochirina Kirishitan: hierarchy, faith and sin  18 Internal Japanese Jesuit texts: scholasticism and humanism  23 Ricci’s Chinese Christianity: Confucianism meets Christ  25 Ricci and Habian: two discourses, two worlds  29 Conclusion: Christianity in Japan – a broad church  31

2 Japanese Confucianism and Japanese Christianity: parallels and interactions Myōtei Mondō: harnessing Confucianism to Christianity  35 Japanese Confucianism and Christianity: two discourses, one conflict  37 Early Japanese Confucianism: individual versus institution  39 Confucians and Christians: fighting the same battles  41 Hadaiusu: apostasy or adaptation?  42 Hadaiusu explored: elements of continuity  45 Conclusion: Habian’s tenkō and the role of autonomy in politics and society  50

34

vi  Contents

3 Early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse: proclamations, populist literature and diplomacy

52

The political roots of the suppression of Christianity  53 The spread of the suppression and its political consequences  54 Proclamations: a call to order  56 Populist texts: a political project  58 Kirishitan Monogatari: dehumanization and derision  59 Suzuki Shōsan: tradition as legitimation  61 The ‘anti-Christian canon’ reconsidered: politics over doctrine  64 Haiyaso: constructing a Confucian–Christian dichotomy  66 Diplomatic correspondence: in search of a Confucian base  70 Hayashi Razan’s diplomatic dichotomies  71 Changes in the east Asian order  75 Conclusion: anti-Christian discourse as ideological construct and political tool  76

4 Attacking non-Christian ‘Christians’: ideological uses of early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse

78

Confucianism’s role in the early Tokugawa shogunate  79 Razan’s ‘late-period anti-Christian discourse’  81 The Ishikawa Jōzan letters: Delineating heterodoxy, expanding sectarianism  82 Sōzoku zenkōki: record of rebellion  87 Sōzoku zenkōki: was Razan its author?  88 Sōzoku zenki: ‘anti-Christian’ attacks on Kumazawa Banzan and Soshin  89 Sōzoku kōki: Marshalling the discourse on ‘heterodox thought’  95 Comparisons, conclusions and questions  98

5 Mid- and late Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse: continuity and change Putting down the cudgels: The mid-Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse of Arai Hakuseki, Ogyū Sorai and Miura Baien  104 Arai Hakuseki’s Wild West: Taking cues from China  105 Hakuseki’s Christian–Confucian problematic: Governance and loyalty  107 Hakuseki’s Honsarokukō: Ambivalence revealed  109 Ogyū Sorai: Christianity as scholarly object  111

103

Contents  vii Miura Baien: The Christian threat returns  113 Late Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse: Mito Learning, Christianity and ideology  115 Fujita Yūkoku and Sonnō jōi thought: Ordering the ruling classes  116 Aizawa Seishisai and Kokutairon: Harnessing the masses  118 Seishisai’s Kikōben: A focus on Christianity  120 Tokugawa Nariaki’s Hajashū and Sokkyohen: Creating an antiChristian canon  121 Kiyū Dōjin’s Hekijashū and Hekijakankenroku: Pure-land Buddhism’s role  123 Sokkyohen and Hekijakankenroku: Confucians and Buddhists in anti-Christian concert  125 Yasui Sokken: The post-Restoration continuities of antiChristian discourse  127 Conclusion: Transformation and continuity  129

6 Meiji anti-Christian discourse: modern national ideology and conservatism

131

The two Inoues  133 Inoue Enryō: the Imperial Constitution and religion  134 Enryō’s philosophical ‘truth’: ‘transcending’ Hegel  137 Meiji political debate and the Imperial Rescript on Education  141 The Rescript Explicated: Inoue Tetsujirō’s commentary  142 The Uchimura Kanzō Incident  146 ‘The clash between education and religion’  148 ‘The Clash’ and egalitarianism  150 History making and making history  153 Eastern ‘philosophy’ versus Christian ‘religion’  156 Conclusion: discursive fusion and enduring dichotomies  158

Conclusion

161

Reading anti-Christian discourse: whose frameworks?  161 Building ideology with history  162 Modern secularization or something more?  164

Notes Select bibliography Index

167 200 221

Key to abbreviations and notes on translation

Abbreviations – Languages Jp. = Japanese Ch. = Chinese Lat. = Latin Port. = Portuguese

Abbreviations – source collection titles 1. KKRS: Ebisawa Arimichi 海老沢有道, Kirishitan kyōrishoキリシタン教 理書, Tokyo: Kyōbunkan, 1993. KKRS DC – Dochirina Kirishitanドチリナ・キリシタン (1600 printing) KKRS EA – Ebisawa Arimichi 海老沢有道, “Kaidai” 解題 KKRS KE – Kirishitan kokoroegaki吉利支丹心得書 KKRS MT – Myōtei Mondō 妙貞問答 KKRS NK – Nihon no katekizumo 日本ノカテキズモ 2. NST25: Ebisawa Arimichi 海老沢有道 (et al., eds) Kirishitansho/Haiyasho キリシタン書・排耶書, Nihon shisō taikei 日本思想体系, vol. 25, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1970. 3. NST28: Ishida Ichirō 石田一郎 (et al., eds), Fujiwara Seika / Hayashi Razan, Nihon shisō taikei, vol. 28, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1975. 4. NST29: Bitō Masahide 尾藤正英 (et al., eds), Nakae Tōju中江藤樹, Nihon shisō taikei, vol. 29, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1974. 5. NST30: Gotō Yōichi後藤陽一 (et al., eds), Kumazawa Banzan熊沢蕃山, Nihon shisō taikei, vol. 30, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1971. 6. NST35: Matsumura Akira 松村明 (et al., eds) Arai Hakuseki 新井白石, Nihon shisō taikei, vol. 35, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1975. 7. NST36: Yoshikawa Kōjirō 吉川幸次郎 (et al., eds.) Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠, Nihon shisō taikei, vol. 36, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1973. 8. NST47: Nakamura Yukihiko中村幸彦 (et al., eds) Kinsei kōki juka shū近世 後期儒家集, Nihon shisō taikei, vol. 47, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1973. 9. NST53: Imai Usaburō 今井宇三郎 (et al., eds), Mitogaku 水戸学, Nihon shisō taikei, vol. 53, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1973. 10. ZX: Zhu Xi 朱熹, Sishu zhangju jizhu 四書章句集注, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983.

Abbreviations and translation  ix

Notes on translation This book includes liberal use of quotations from historical sources, the vast majority of which have been translated by the author. Where other translations are used this is noted. The translations by the author cover Chinese and Japanese language sources from over a 300-year period. A good number of these translations, especially a large percentage of the translations in Chapter 4 and towards the end of Chapter 5, are done directly from manuscript sources which have never been printed or translated and which have only rarely been referred to in academic literature. Other translations, however, reference modern Japanese collections which reprint more well-known original source material in the original form but in typed characters. These comprise the majority of sources used in Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 5. At some points in Chapters 3 and 5 I also reference volumes of Nihon shisō taikei (NST) where originally Chinese language (kanbun) Japanese sources have been rendered by the process of kundoku or kakikudashi into a new word order matching rules of classical Japanese grammar. Translations of these sources, primarily a percentage of the writings quoted from Fujiwara Seika and Hayashi Razan contained in NST28, writings by Kumazawa Banzan contained in NST30, and writings by Fujita Yūkoku and Aizawa Seishisai contained in NST53, were checked against printed kanbun versions in the Bunshū collections of each of these authors. Notes are given to the popular NST series for ease of reference.

Introduction

February 27th, 1925, the day after the ratification of the Japanese–Russian Treaty, I find myself writing the introduction to my history of the thought of the early Tokugawa period.1 How strange! The present government of Russia is a Soviet government. It is a Red government. The Japanese Empire, the fundamental national character [kokutai 国体]2 of which is unique in the world, requires great self-confidence in order to sign a treaty with such a country. Concretely, it requires us to assume that regardless of the resumption of relations we need not be afraid of infection by Russian Redness or of infiltration by Russian Communism. Can we be confident that the Japanese masses will under no circumstances be moved by the incursions of other kinds of thought? I have no hesitation in strongly declaring in the affirmative. The development of a unique Japanese thought [capable of resisting external ideas] dates from the foundation of Japan itself. But if we enquire as to the recent diffusion of this unique outlook among the masses, we must say that this dates from the thought of the Tokugawa period.3 For Tokutomi Sohō 徳富蘇峰 (1863–1957), one of the most influential political writers of late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century Japan, the anti-communist stance of the modern Japanese nation he was living in was intimately linked to the anti-Christian stance of the Tokugawa shogunate (1600–1868). Both were examples of ‘unique Japanese thought’ and its ability to resist ‘the incursions of other kinds of thought’. The idea that since antiquity ‘unique Japanese thought’ had existed as a defining feature of the nation was a key element of modern Japanese imperial ideology. Indeed, this kind of essentialism played a role in the ideological construction of most modern nations. At the core of the modern Japanese empire’s version of nationalist ideology was the concept of kokutai – the unique, unchanging and defining character of the Japanese nation since time immemorial. For Tokutomi, as for many other mainstream writers and historians before and since, the nature of kokutai and Japanese anti-Christian discourse were linked.4 In Japanese history there have been two major outbreaks of anti-Christian writing, propaganda and discourse. The first occurred in the decades after the banning and suppression of Christianity in Japan by the Tokugawa shogunate

2

Introduction

through the early and mid-1600s, at the same time as the Tokugawa shogunal systems of governance were established. The second began during the decline and fall of the Tokugawa shogunate from the early 1800s and continued through the Meiji Restoration and well into the twentieth century. The peak of this second wave of anti-Christian discourse occurred in the late 1880s and early 1890s, at the same time as important new institutions and instruments of the modern Meiji state were being established. The Imperial Constitution and the Imperial Rescript on Education were promulgated in this period, and it was through them that key elements of modern national ideology, like the meaning of the term kokutai, became embedded in the public consciousness and state structures of modern Japan.5 These two waves of anti-Christian discourse occurred during the formations of what are generally described as the early modern and modern Japanese states respectively, which makes it surprising that no study until now has examined the phenomenon across both periods. In modern Japan, anti-Christian discourse clearly played an ideological role, and that role has been acknowledged.6 Yet the history of anti-Christian discourse in the early Tokugawa period has always been narrated in a religious paradigm emphasizing a clash between Eastern and Western religious cultures, leaving its political implications often ignored. The two periods of anti-Christian discourse have thereby ended up being examined as two discrete and unconnected phenomena – one political, one religious. Looking at them in tandem opens a new array of questions, particularly relating to the political role of early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse and its later effects. Was early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse the forerunner of its modern equivalent? If not, how was it different? If there were similarities, does that mean that early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse also helped shape modern Japanese ideology? Did anti-Christian discourse play an ideological role in the Tokugawa period? If so, how was that ideological role linked to the objectives of the regime or those within it? What were the links, if any, between Tokugawa and Meiji anti-Christian discourse and their ideological roles? These questions are not only of central importance in understanding the role of anti-Christian ideas in Japanese society. They have important implications for the study of larger issues relating to the nature of the continuity between the Tokugawa and Meiji states, the role of political thought in Tokugawa Japan, and the relationship between the political and ideological systems of each state. Those questions of Japanese history furthermore link into larger issues of world history relating to the nature of early modernity and political modernization. In particular, these questions have implications for the way we look at the roles of ideology, religion and secularization in establishing what some would simply call central political control, and others might call political modernity. The formation of a unifying national ideology is considered one of the characteristics of the modern nation-state. The national ideology of what is usually identified as the modern Japanese nation-state, the Japanese empire of 1868–1945, has been a major topic of discussion in post-WWII Japan. The strongly cohesive, integrating nature of modern imperial Japanese national ideology is often linked

Introduction

3

to the negative (authoritarian, ultra-nationalist, fascist) characteristics with which that state eventually came to be associated.7 It is fascinating to note that these same culturally integrating and ordering aspects of a state are the very features that some influential commentators also suggest define a state’s ‘modern’ nature.8 One theme of this book is to link exploration of what role anti-Christian discourse played in this modern and nationalist ideology with its ideological role before the establishment of the Meiji state – during the Tokugawa state. Therefore, in this book I refer to at least two different kinds of ideology. When I refer to the nationalist ideology of the modern Japanese state, or ‘modern ideology’, I refer to a cohesive system of social control which was clearly deliberately manufactured by Meiji oligarchs in the late 1800s to replicate the intellectual/religious systems which they considered provided national cohesion and social control in European states: the ideology of modern nationalism.9 But I also discuss the deployment of ideology in Tokugawa Japan. In this latter case I refer not to a totalistic national ideology, but to broader uses of discourse for power political purposes during the course of the Tokugawa period. In the case of the Tokugawa state these uses were sometimes statist, but seldom nationalist. They also were clearly not in any shape as monolithic as was the construction of ideology in the Meiji period.10 In relation to both these forms and periods, I recall the contemporary political scientist Michael Freeden’s definition of ‘ideologies’ as not simply dogmas, but real forms of political thinking. Concretely Freeden has defined ideologies as: 1) importantly attached to social groups or classes; 2) performing a range of services, such as legitimation, integration, socialization, ordering, simplification, and action-orientation, without which societies could not function adequately, if at all; 3) reflecting variegated perceptions, misperceptions, and conceptualizations of existing social worlds; 4) being inevitably associated with power; and 5) consisting of actual arrangements of political thinking.11 I use the word ideology broadly following this definition.12 I think it is also important to delineate ideology and ideological discourse from broader conceptualizations of ‘discourse’. As Terry Eagleton has noted in his criticism of what he calls Foucault’s ‘abandonment of the concept of ideology altogether’: ‘the force of the term ideology [as opposed to ‘discourse’] lies in its capacity to discriminate between those power struggles which are somehow central to a whole form of social life, and those which are not’.13 Eagleton’s point here parallels Michael Freeden’s insistence on the importance of delineating ideology as a subject of enquiry in its own right.14

Uncovering the politics of anti-Christian discourse Although no comprehensive study has been made of anti-Christian discourse in Japan linking the early modern and modern periods, there has been a range of conjecture over the role of early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse in the overall political history of Japan. Much of that conjecture has related to larger theoretical issues concerning the role of religion and processes of secularization in political modernization. The most powerful comment on the potential centrality of

4

Introduction

Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse in the mainstream history of Japanese political thought was made by the scholar who still defines that field today. Although the comments were published only in 2000, it was back in 1966 that Maruyama Masao 丸山真男 (1914–96) made an argument that runs against the grain of almost all other scholarship on anti-Christian discourse, including most of that written since. Rather than focusing on the ‘foreignness’ of Christianity as the cause of anti-Christian activity – something most mainstream historians continued to do right through the twentieth century – Maruyama posited that the prohibition of Christianity was indicative of a much more significant and universal historical development. We should not focus on each individual ruler’s policy of prohibiting Christianity as a ‘foreign religion’, but rather look at the prohibition of Christianity from within the context of the overall process of domestic political change which occurred in Japan from the end of the Muromachi period through into the Tokugawa period. This process gave birth to early-modern systems of control, bringing religious power in general into confrontation with secular authority, religious influence in the end becoming completely subordinated to the latter in one of history’s great moments of change.15 Maruyama here suggested that the large-scale suppression of the power of organized Buddhist religious and lay people by war lord leaders in the second half of the sixteenth century was closely related to the later suppression of Christianity, and was part of the birth of ‘early-modern systems of control’. For Maruyama, the suppression of Christianity in Japan in the early seventeenth century was not a function of it being ‘Western’ or ‘foreign’. He saw the suppression of Christianity as part of a longer historical process dating back to the 1500s by which the influence of religion in general (notably including Buddhism) had been utterly subjugated to political authority. For a scholar whose career began in resistance to an authoritarian state – the power of which was justified in large part through the use of an ideologically manufactured state religion (the militarist Japanese empire of the 1930s and early 1940s) – this analysis had important and obvious modern political ramifications.16 This was especially the case seeing as Maruyama had famously explained the emergence of the authoritarian pre-WWII order in Japan as in large part determined by the development of political thought during the Tokugawa period – a development which began with the suppression of Christianity.17 Some contemporary Japanese scholars, including some whose theoretical approach is quite different to Maruyama’s, have followed him in this analysis of the significant political role of anti-Christian activity in Japanese history. Kurozumi Makoto, for instance, has written of the image of Christianity in Tokugawa Japan as ‘an imagined rather than real projection of what was alien to the consciousness of order, a necessary “demon”, an oppositional figure against which the early modern Japanese order was established’.18 Through the Tokugawa period itself, however, the suppression of Christianity was represented and justified through a pervasive anti-Christian discourse which

Introduction

5

argued that Christianity was a ‘Western’ or ‘barbarian’ religion, one inherently opposed to ‘Eastern’, ‘Japanese’, ‘civilized’ ethical and religious systems. This discourse in turn heavily influenced modern historical representations of the suppression of Christianity from the late nineteenth into most of the twentieth century.19 Today, most scholarship presents the suppression of Christianity in more complex terms.20 Yet the history of anti-Christian discourse itself is even today still typically characterized, in intellectual history terms, as a ‘clash’ between ‘Western religion’ and ‘Eastern religious systems’.21 In other words, much scholarship on this period, while acknowledging the structural political realities that lay behind the suppression of Christianity, has nevertheless tended to analyse the role of ideas in this process from a culturalist perspective, labelling ideas ‘Western’ or ‘Eastern’, and narrating the flow of history as a determined function of an essentialized conception of ‘culture’. This has almost invariably led to the anti-Christian activity and propaganda of the Tokugawa period being explained in terms of the same ‘clash of cultures’ discourse which it itself projects. This is despite the fact that most anti-Christian writing emerged after nearly all Christian elements had been eradicated from Japanese society. This indicates, as will be explored further in the following chapters, that the key political and ideological drivers for anti-Christian writing lay not in some clash between Eastern and Western religions and cultures, but in concrete conflicts occurring in domestic Japanese politics. It is also important to note that the anti-Christian activity of the early Tokugawa period appears to have occurred as part of a broader trend of political suppression of certain religious and minority groups in Japanese society. As pointed out by Maruyama, that trend began with attempts by warlords before Oda Nobunaga to suppress the Ikkō Ikki in the sixteenth century.22 It continued through the course of the Tokugawa period not only as anti-Christian activity, but also through attacks on and demonization of members of Japanese society by a range of other sectarian means, including associating them with non-Christian religions like the Fujufuseha sect of Nichiren Buddhism, or with certain caste and social groups like the Kawata.23 A study of this entire process would require a much larger treatment than is possible in this short volume. This book focuses only on the history of anti-Christian discourse in Japan from 1600 to 1900 – charting its development and political utilization through both its peak periods in the seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries.24

Outline At the outset, such a study needs to overcome the culturalist representation of the relationship between Christian and anti-Christian thought in the late sixteenth/ early seventeenth century as some kind of ‘clash’ between ‘Western and Eastern thought traditions’. A solid history of anti-Christian discourse over the entire Tokugawa period first requires us to revisit both the early anti-Christian discourse of the seventeenth century – the source of most anti-Christian writings of the Tokugawa period – and also the Japanese Christian writing with which it is so often compared.25

6

Introduction

Therefore, before embarking on an examination of early Tokugawa antiChristian discourse, the initial chapter of this book first addresses the Japanese Christian thought of the late 1500s and early 1600s. This chapter concentrates on bringing out the intellectual diversity found within these texts. In addition to discussing the different approaches and different genres of Christian texts in Japan during this period, this chapter also makes clear the significant influence of Confucian and other East Asian thought on Japanese Christian texts. This chapter thereby significantly reforms the classic representation of early Japanese Christian thought as some kind of simple representation of doctrinaire Catholicism or some kind of monolithic tradition of ‘Western thought’. Instead it demonstrates the high level of diversity, syncretistic tendencies and significant social and intellectual integration of some elements of the Japanese Christian thought of this time. The second chapter considers the broader intellectual context of early Tokugawa Japan. Building on the revision of the image of Japanese Christian thought presented in Chapter 1, this chapter uncovers similar intellectual diversity, conflict and pluralism in the emergent Japanese Neo-Confucian thought of this period. Comparing a range of conflicts within both traditions, this chapter points to overlaps and parallels between developments within these two traditions at this time. Focusing on the implications for political thought of these overlapping conflicts, this chapter suggests that the intellectual context of early Tokugawa Japan should not be seen as a field of conflict between competing traditions, but perhaps rather as a period of general intellectual change across traditions, linked more to the massive changes in political culture occurring at the time. This chapter thereby suggests that the shift towards a heavy focus on intellectual orthodoxy within Confucianism, and the emergence of anti-Christian sectarian thought and more conservative Christian thought in place of pluralist Christian and Tentō Confucian thought, may have been part of the same trend in Japanese thought at this time towards a reduction of diversity, a concentration on orthodoxy, and integration with political power.26 After considering this broader intellectual context relating to the interaction between different traditions and political authority in the early Tokugawa period, the third chapter begins our examination of the history of anti-Christian discourse in Japan. This chapter first revisits the history of the Tokugawa shogunate’s initial suppression of Christianity between 1612 and 1614, and confirms the non-religious power-political context and motivations for the ban. We then examine the first official government anti-Christian discourse of the suppression, the shogunateissued anti-Christian proclamations. After looking at the very limited number of anti-Christian writings dating from the actual period of suppression, the chapter then moves on to study the genre that represents the majority of anti-Christian writings from the seventeenth century – the populist anti-Christian literature that emerged in the 1640s, 1650s and 1660s. It is this literature that makes up the bulk of the ‘canon’ of anti-Christian texts examined in most histories of this period.27 Here it is noted that one obvious reason why Christianity was not seriously addressed was that nearly all these ‘anti-Christian’ texts were produced after the

Introduction

7

annihilation of Christianity in Japan was complete. This fact alone directs our inquiry towards other motivations for the production of anti-Christian discourse in the Japan of this time. By examining a range of these texts, we confirm that even at this early stage, most arguments presented in anti-Christian literature were not doctrinal or religious but focused on issues of political order and conservatism. The last third of this chapter deals with a different field of anti-Christian discourse from this period, one which has been virtually ignored until now: the employment of anti-Christian discourse in diplomatic correspondence. The more simplistic anti-Christian discourse of the commonly examined populist texts develops in a more significantly ideological fashion in the diplomatic correspondence. Most notably, at this time diplomatic writers like Hayashi Razan develop a Christian– Confucian dichotomy which they deploy in letters to China in a manner that allows them to harness broader East Asian international relations discourses like the ‘civilization–barbarism’ paradigm of imperial China. This development shows anti-Christian discourse already, at this early stage, being deliberately deployed for state-related political uses and developed within more complex ideological frameworks. The fourth chapter examines the evolution of this same kind of more developed anti-Christian discourse in intra-elite political confrontations in mid-seventeenthcentury Japan. The sources of anti-Christian discourse examined in this chapter include letters and pamphlets distributed among leading intellectual figures involved in intra-shogunal political conflicts. Like the diplomatic documents examined in the previous chapter, nearly all the sources used in this chapter have not been properly examined in any previous research on anti-Christian writing. As opposed to the commonly examined populist literature of the same period, these documents show development of anti-Christian discourse, again often in terms of a Confucian–Christian dichotomy, in a manner clearly meant to serve immediate political purposes. The research presented in this chapter leaves it in no doubt that even by the 1650s the use of anti-Christian discourse had little connection with the Christian issue. Anti-Christian discourse had rather become a brand or discursive tool for delineating intellectual and political orthodoxy and heterodoxy and for attacking clearly non-Christian political enemies and ideas. These chapters thereby establish the extent of ideological use of anti-Christian discourse during the consolidation of Tokugawa power and the construction of the Tokugawa state in the mid-1600s. By the late 1600s, as the structure of Tokugawa governance solidified, anti-Christian discourse in Japan declined. There would not be another wave of popular anti-Christian writing until the 1800s. The fifth chapter traces the history of anti-Christian discourse through the rest of the Tokugawa period, noting isolated anti-Christian writing of the eighteenth century, including that of some of the most influential Japanese thinkers of this period such as Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666–1728) and Arai Hakuseki 新井白石 (1657–1725). The bulk of this chapter, however, concentrates on the beginnings of the second outbreak of anti-Christian discourse, which occurred in the so-called bakumatsu period as the Tokugawa shogunate began to fall apart. Here we examine a range

8

Introduction

of anti-Christian writings by some of the most important ideological thinkers of this period. In particular, this chapter pays close attention to anti-Christian writings by Mito scholars, such as Aizawa Seishisai 会沢正志斎 (1782–1863), who are considered to have been instrumental in building the base of Japanese imperial ideology. The key focus is on writings that concretely connect the early and later Tokugawa waves of anti-Christian discourse, the most important of which are two edited collections of early Tokugawa anti-Christian writings that appear to have been edited by Aizawa Seishisai. These collections, the Mito Lord Tokugawa Nariaki’s 徳川斉昭 (1800–60) Sokkyohen 息距編 (1860) and the head of the Jōdo (Pure Land) sect of Buddhism Kiyū Dōjin’s 杞憂道 人 (also known as Ugai Tetsujō 鵜飼徹定) (1814–91) Hekijakankenroku 闢 邪管見録 (1861), were not only popular and influential publications at the time, they have also gone on to become the major sources of early Tokugawa anti-Christian writing used in academic research during the twentieth century. This chapter thereby shows not only the relationship between early and late Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse, but also examines the significant influence of late Tokugawa anti-Christian Mito scholarship on modern and contemporary academic writing on early Tokugawa history. This link is crucial to the question of ideology, given that key elements of modern imperial Japanese ideology – such as the concepts of kokutai and sonnō jōi (revere the emperor, expel the barbarians) – originated among Mito Confucian thinkers. The sixth chapter squarely examines the direct role of this second wave of antiChristian discourse in the formation of Meiji ideology. While the previous chapter touches on the links between anti-Christian discourse and originally Mito ideas like kokutai and sonnō jōi that went on to be key elements in Meiji ideology, this chapter examines direct engagement of questions of political ideology through anti-Christian arguments in the 1880s and 1890s. In particular, this chapter concentrates on the role of anti-Christian discourse, and ideas on religion in general, in the authorship and promulgation of the Constitution of the Greater Japanese Empire (Imperial Constitution) and the Imperial Rescript on Education. Here it is argued that a range of the political interpretations that came to be associated with imperial Japanese ideology through the promulgation of these documents were established through public discourse and debate centred on the ‘Uchimura Kanzō Incident’ and the ‘Debate on the Clash Between Education and Religion’, both of which rested on anti-Christian discourse. The anti-Christian discourse deployed in this period, however, was remarkably different to that of the early and late Tokugawa period, in that its chief arguments against religion were imported from Europe. This discourse, while also using Tokugawa anti-Christian arguments, was often set in a more internationalized philosophical and political context. In sources from the 1890s, we see the clear influence of Western theories about the nature of modern nation states, ‘national ethics’, ‘social organism theory’ and other ideas guiding modern national ideology formation in many different parts of the world. This gives us the opportunity to potentially isolate different elements of Meiji ideology which were affected either by the international intellectual milieu, or alternatively by the political tradition of anti-Christian discourse dating back

Introduction

9

to the early modern era. It also gives us the opportunity to look at the interplay of different ideas, both modern and pre-modern, in the formation of national ideology; and thereby perhaps to even question some of the assumed parameters often applied to so-called political modernization.

1

Japanese Christian thought Doctrinal diversity or civilizational clash?

What is the object of the ‘anti’ in Japanese anti-Christian discourse? Generally, it is naturally assumed to be ‘Christianity’, in particular the Christian thought that arose and was popularized in Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, directly before the ban on Catholicism and the advent of mass antiChristian activity in the mid-seventeenth century. But is that true? Was there actually any concrete relationship between the Christian and anti-Christian discourses of seventeenth-century Japan, and if so what was the nature of that relationship? Answering this question is crucial to unpacking the political relevance of anti-Christian discourse, including its role in modern ideology formation. The assumption that anti-Christian discourse was a reaction to Christianity in Tokugawa Japan has fed narratives in mainstream historical writing on Japan that emphasize cultural (particularist) rather than structural (universalist) approaches. The history of Japanese anti-Christian thought has thereby been employed consistently to justify particularist political conceptions of nationhood.1 For this reason any honest attempt to examine the political function of anti-Christian thought in Japanese history must begin by identifying the characteristics and functions of Christian thought in early Tokugawa Japan and the nature of its relationship with anti-Christian ideas. This chapter examines Japanese Christian thought of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, concentrating on those writers and ideas that were most influential and most likely to interact with or provoke anti-Christian discourse. One useful place to start that examination is with the work of a Japanese Christian who later went on to play a defining role in the development of anti-Christian discourse.

Habian: on the front line of ‘the clash of civilizations’ Habian ハビアン (1565–1621) – also known as Fabian, Fukansai Habian 不干斎 巴鼻庵, Hapian ハピアン, Habiyan ハビヤン, and Fukan 不干 – was a prominent Jesuit apologist, public speaker, and author of the famous Japanese Jesuit text Myōtei Mondō 妙貞問答. Through these activities he came to be identified as the most influential of all Japanese Christian thinkers of the so-called first period of

Japanese Christian thought

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Christianity in Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.2 As the most competent Japanese Jesuit rhetorician of his time, Habian was dispatched from Nagasaki in 1603 to the ‘Jesuit Temple’ in the Japanese capital, Kyoto. While there, Habian not only authored Myōtei Mondō, but moreover became widely known in the city as a charismatic orator and representative of the Jesuits in debates against notable Buddhist and Confucian figures. By 1608, however, Habian seems to have left the Jesuits. Notably, this was before the Tokugawa shogunate’s active persecution of Christians that began in 1613–14. By 1620, Habian was back in Nagasaki, but seemingly not on the Christian side. Indeed, he is said to have participated in the suppression of Christianity, most notably through his authorship of Hadaius, a work that went on to become the most famous antiChristian text of this period.3 After Habian’s death, the dramatic story of his life, in particular his so-called ‘apostasy’, appeared as a theme in a range of literary works.4 Thenceforth, Habian’s Jesuit and post-Jesuit ideas, together with his personal history, came to be presented through a virulent anti-Christian discourse as an example of the intellectual and political clash between ‘Japan’ and the ‘the West’. In other words, his ideas and actions came to be understood in terms of an imagined, constructed conflict between images of ‘Japaneseness’ and ‘non-Japaneseness’.5 Interestingly, this same framework, constructed by anti-Christian polemicists in the Tokugawa period, has also been the one through which most historians of the twentieth century have analysed not just Habian’s works, but indeed the Japanese Christian thought of this period in general. In almost all the twentieth-century research on this period, Japanese Christian writing such as Habian’s Jesuit-period work Myōtei Mondō has been highly valued as a source of Japanese intellectual history; but that value has been discussed in terms of its role in ‘challenging traditional Japanese thought’ by ‘introducing Western thought’ to Japan.6 In other words, Japanese Christian writings such as Habian’s have been examined in terms of a historiography which assumes a priori a pair of mutually exclusive categories called ‘Eastern thought’ and ‘Western thought’. Rather than treating Habian’s Christian thought as original work, scholars have often approached it as some kind of ‘translation’ of ‘Western thought’; and Habian’s ‘apostasy’ has thereby inevitably been portrayed as a reaction against this ‘Western thought’. Habian has thus been a tool in Japanese historiography for making value judgements about the highs and lows of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ thought, and by extension politics and culture. In pre-WWII fascist-period research, Habian’s apostasy was seen as a ‘return to the true [non-Christian] path’.7 Conversely, in the postwar period a whole genre of so-called ‘Christian history research’, led by Ebisawa Arimichi, emerged in reaction. In this postwar writing, Habian’s apostasy was historicized as a representation of the shogunate’s ‘irrational’ reaction against the ‘good teachings’ of Western philosophy and Christianity.8 The political inclination changed, but the East–West framework remained the same. Even in much later scholarly criticisms of this kind of ‘Christian history research’, a good example being George Elison’s Deus Destroyed, the same image

12

Japanese Christian thought

of Habian’s Jesuit-period work as a representative of ‘Western thought’ was retained. Elison’s work, while at times more nuanced and offering impressive new research, in the end presents an argument that basically just inverts the ‘Japanese Christian history’ approach championed by Ebisawa, which itself was an inversion of the nationalist historiography of the likes of Shinmura and before him Inoue Tetsujirō.9 This historiography was itself intimately linked to the basis of Japanese modern ideology. Today, the dominant historical views on this period, represented either by Ebisawa and his followers, or by Elison, continue to analyse Habian’s ideas in terms of categories which present ‘Japanese’ and ‘Western’ thought traditions as mutually exclusive opposites engaged in conflict. They thereby continue to work in frameworks clearly derived from Tokugawa-period anti-Christian discourse itself. These are also the same frameworks which supported the formation of modern ideology in Meiji Japan, and indeed which ironically also potentially support the historically inaccurate and politically dangerous ‘clash of civilization’ arguments so in vogue through the late 1990s and early 2000s, and which so closely resemble the nationalist ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There is ample evidence, however, to suggest that intellectual and religious discourse in Japan in the late 1500s and early 1600s was far from the polarized image of mutually exclusive ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ thought discussed above. For instance, one of the most important terms used in Myōtei Mondō is Confucian (Jingireichishin 仁義礼智信 benevolence, justice, custom, knowledge and faith); and much of the logic of the argument relies on a Buddhist paradigm adopted by Song Confucians, the tiyong 体用 (Jp. taiyō) dichotomy.10 Furthermore, significant trends of Confucian thought popular in Japan at this time had many elements in common with what was identified as Christian thought. In fact the content of texts which later came to be labelled as part of separate ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ thought traditions often overlapped to such an extent that 1970s research on some Japanese Tentō Confucian texts of the early seventeenth century mistakenly claimed that these texts were written by Christians.11 What this suggests is that the various intellectual currents and traditions should not be taken in isolation, and must be considered in the context of their production and utilization.

Currents of Japanese Christian thought: contrasting genres Examining Japanese Christian thought in the broader context of other Japanese thought of the same period recommends a focus on those Japanese Christian texts which had the most currency in general society. So although this chapter deals with a wide array of Japanese Christian texts designed for use both inside and outside the Jesuit order, and by both Christians and non-Christians, I pay particular attention to texts that had the most impact outside the purely religious communities. Myōtei Mondō 妙貞問答, Dochirina Kirishitan ドチリな・キリ シタン, and Tianzhu Shiyi (Jp. Tenshu Jitsugi) 天主実義 seem to have been the three most popular Christian texts in early seventeenth-century Japan written in Japanese or Chinese. All three texts were written to promote Christianity to non-

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believers or recent converts, with an agnostic or non-Christian Japanese (or in the case of Tianzhu Shiyi, Chinese) readership in mind; and all three were deployed not only within Christian communities, but also in the wider Japanese community. These three texts were not only the most referenced and popularly disseminated Christian texts of the early Tokugawa period, they also fortuitously happen to represent three major kinds of author of Jesuit texts read in Japan. Myōtei Mondō is a completely original piece, full of in-depth references to Asian intellectual/ religious traditions. It was written in Japanese by a Jesuit brother who was Japanese. Dochirina Kirishitan espouses a rather conservative, one might even say superstitious, doctrine. It was also written in Japanese, but was derived from a European text. The Japanese edition was edited by a European Jesuit. Tianzhu Shiyi was authored by a China-based Jesuit of European origin, in fact one of the most famous Jesuits in history, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). Tianzhu Shiyi was written in Chinese, and not only refers heavily to Chinese thought traditions but also even makes an overt attempt to integrate Christianity into the Confucian tradition. Of these three, Myōtei Mondō is the best example of how ‘Christian thought’ developed indigenously in Japan during this period: it is the only one authored by a Japanese, and written completely within the context of the Japanese Christian movement at the turn of the sixteenth into the seventeenth century. Partly for that reason, and partly because of its content, which will be examined presently, it should be regarded as the best example of indigenous Japanese Christian thought extant from this period. Interestingly, it is also the work which has been most misinterpreted, abused, and wilfully manipulated over the centuries. It is also the only major Christian text written in Japanese that is linked directly to significant anti-Christian arguments, not only through Habian’s own anti-Christian writings after his apostasy, but also in the arguments of other key anti-Christian figures of the early Tokugawa period such as Hayashi Razan 林羅山 (1583–1657) and Suzuki Shōsan 鈴木正三 (1579–1655).

Myōtei Mondō: creation, ethics and afterlife Myōtei Mondō is an excellent text for examining the interaction between different intellectual and religious traditions in early seventeenth-century Japan because its structure revolves around a systematic examination of different traditions. The text consists of three sections or chapters. The first section systematically analyses different teachings of Buddhism sect by sect; the second discusses Confucianism and Shinto; and the third deals with Christianity. Being a Jesuit text, Myōtei Mondō tends to argue the weaknesses of Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto and point to the comparative superiority of Christianity. This is done primarily by asserting that Christianity gives the best hope of the afterlife. The narrative of Myōtei Mondō is based around the premise of a discussion between two female seekers, both widowed by war, both former Buddhist nuns. Myōshū, a newcomer, asks questions of Yūtei, a confirmed Christian believer, who explains to her the truth of Christianity in comparison with the other religious

14

Japanese Christian thought

traditions they have experienced. Both Myōshū and Yūtei present as women with a broad knowledge of a range of religious traditions, sympathetic characters who through personal tragedy, brought on by the violence during that period of Japanese history, have become truth-seekers.12 The longest, most positive, and most articulate section of Myōtei Mondō is the third and last section where Habian explains the nature of ‘the teachings of the Christians’. Previous research has referred to this section mainly to point out its use of scholastic philosophy and Christian creation theory.13 But this section is actually anything but a simple recommendation of Catholic doctrine: in addition to creation theory, this section lays out what Habian sees as the ethical system of Christianity – its teachings relating to how the person created by God should act in the created world.14 This key argument, which in fact dominates the whole text, most obviously overlaps with the humanist ethical traditions that were contemporaneously being presented in new Japanese Confucian writings of this period. Previous research has not mentioned the human ethics argument of Myōtei Mondō directly, yet the emphasis on ‘rationality’ and ‘knowledge’ mentioned by Ebisawa,15 and the text’s political nature, mentioned by Elison,16 both revolve around this key feature. Habian’s presentation of these human ethics is built on his scholastic-mediated Aristotelian explication of creation theory. Habian’s explication of creation theory is central to the overall thesis of his work not only because it supports his argument about human ethics, but also because it stands at the centre of his criticism of Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto. He argues that because all three of these traditions are incapable of explaining the foundations of existence (creation), they are intellectually deficient and unlikely to lead to salvation. This thesis is spelt out most clearly at the end of the first section where Habian summarizes the underlying problem that all the Buddhist sects share in common: because the original Buddha is held to be nothingness, Buddhism thereby provides no explanation for the cause (creation) of existence.17 Firstly, they hold that in the far distant past, this indiscernible far-off thing called Buddha was the same as emptiness, in other words that it wasn’t anything at all. In Zen they call this honbun 本分 or busshō 仏性, and in Tendai they call it shinnyo 真如. The heart/mind of Buddha, if such a thing is said to exist, is in all cases said to have come from emptiness (kū 空), … in all what is called the Buddha of old, ‘this is emptiness’; in other words, it is nothing at all.18 In the second section of Myōtei Mondō, Habian criticizes Confucianism and Shinto using a similar argument: Confucianism and Shinto possess no sentient force to cause creation. Habian concentrates on the fact that the metaphysical systems of both Confucianism and Shinto explain the basis of existence in terms of Yin and Yang (Jp. inyō 陰陽).19

Japanese Christian thought

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The Yin and Yang has no sentience and no wisdom, its [prime creative] function of fusion and division is not something that can be initiated by the Yin and Yang itself.20 In this manner, Habian alleges that the explanation of creation offered by the Neo-Confucian theory of the Supreme Ultimate is based in a substance (Yin and Yang) that lacks the capacities required to originate a causation: mind/heart (intent) and knowledge.21 In the third section of Myōtei Mondō, Habian directly integrates these representations of Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto into his own version of a scholastic metaphysical framework derived from Aristotelian categories. Habian’s criticisms of the creation theories of Buddhism, Shinto and Confucianism were not simple negations of those theories; rather, he integrated elements of the nonChristian traditions into a system of scholastic metaphysics at the head of which lay the sentient Christian God. Buddhism, Shinto and so on, as should be abundantly clear by now from the discussion above, are all false and cannot be relied upon to deliver our wishes in this world or the next. That is because the base of Buddhism is a return to emptiness, and Buddha itself is thereby emptiness. Also, lying behind the basis of Shinto is Yin and Yang. That is why the Shinto Gods, like Yin and Yang, are nothing more than what I said [empty]. In other words, as emptiness is nothingness, and thereby nothing, the Buddha is nothing to be revered. It does not amount to a Lord or anything like that. Moreover, what is called Yin and Yang is what we in our religion call materia prima, which is the base substance or matter from which the true Lord of our religion, God, created the multifarious things of this world. This materia prima is a substance, the nature of which has no sentience and no will.22 Habian employed Aristotelian anima categories in a scholastic representation of creation which allowed the existence of Yin and Yang as substance, but emphasized the need for something with will and thought as the initial creator of substance. The root of Habian’s arguments against non-Christian religions was thereby tied to the root element of the scholastic theory of creation advanced by him: that sentience and knowledge are prerequisites for the act of creation. Once you have comprehended the existence of God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth and all the multifarious things, then you should be able to see the division of the various categories in his creation. The wide array of all the multifarious things of the past and present we can see stem, in the Christian books, from four general categories. Firstly there is the category of substantia; secondly there is the category of anima vegetabilis; thirdly there is the category of anima sensibilis; fourthly there is what has anima rationalis.23

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Japanese Christian thought

Habian’s explication of anima categories, however, was not related only to his explanation of creation. Much more importantly it was related to his explanation of the nature of the afterlife. In Myōtei Mondō, as in many other texts of popular religious argumentation in this period, the accessibility of an afterlife was of central concern. Myōtei Mondō explains the attainment of afterlife in terms of developing the nature inherent in the Aristotelian category of anima rationalis. This begins with Habian’s description of the nature of each anima category, in which anima rationalis is characterized as follows: The ones possessing anima rationalis have hunger and thirst and feel warm and cold [as do those possessing anima sensibilis – animals], but above that they also understand the nature of things, and possess the knowledge to debate over matters of right and wrong. In other words, they are human beings.24 The centrality of the possession of this anima rationalis as a mark of humanity which thereby endows the possibility of an afterlife in heaven is repeatedly made clear by Habian throughout the third section of Myōtei Mondō. The life immanent in people as anima rationalis is what distinguishes each of us from others. It is what lives on individually into the afterlife.25 The reason why anima rationalis lives on into the afterlife and other (nonhuman) souls (anima) do not, is explained in terms of the logic of the anima classification. The anima category is seen as residing in the nature (Habian uses the word seitai 性体) of a thing. In Myōtei Mondō, Habian directly relates the existence of this nature to the thing’s function (sayō 作用). In terms of all things, we see and know the change in their nature (seitai) through its representation in their function (sayō).26 The nature of an object, which determines its anima, is known to us only through its function. In other words, whether something has the capacity for an afterlife is known by its function. The reason why the category closest to the human category of rationalis, the anima category of sensibilis, does not attain afterlife is explained in terms of the bestial function of the members of this category. The category of anima sensibilis, birds and animals, have senses and thereby know and feel things. But if one then asks, does this mean that they have an afterlife, the answer is that they do not. The reason being that the category of the nature of a thing, as stated earlier, is known by ascertaining its function. Looking at the function of the object of the senses that the beasts and grubs of this category are directed towards, we see that all these objects of sense are of the flesh. By which I say, that they are simply directed towards food in wanting to eat, towards water in wanting to drink, towards sleep in wanting sleep, towards copulation in wanting to copulate. Their making of nests, digging of

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holes, running, flying, crying, howling, these actions are all functions of the flesh [physical needs] and nothing more.27 Because the ‘function’ of animals does not go beyond physical concerns, concerns of the flesh, the lives of their souls are bound to the lives of that physicality, that flesh. Human beings, however, have the potential for an afterlife due to their functionality beyond the physical. People also eat and drink, wake and sleep, breed, and these are all functions. If we look at where these functions reside, we see they are all of the body. But this is not the function [which is peculiar to people]. This other function is that which knows the principle of things, which directs the mind/heart towards commitment to the principles of benevolence, justice, custom, knowledge and faith, and to know the enduring Name. To pray for the afterlife in Heaven, and to consider the right and wrong and good and bad of things, this is also a function. And this function must reside in the nature.28 In other words, because the function of a person extends beyond mere physical concerns and reaches to the abstract issues of principle, right and wrong, good and bad, Heaven, and the Confucian virtues of benevolence, justice, custom, knowledge and faith, a person’s nature transcends the simple existence as flesh and attains the potential for an afterlife. It is important to note that this conception of anima rationalis is concerned not only with overcoming the physical existence of the body as flesh; it also stresses anima rationalis as defined by a function of thought that gives human beings the ability to know abstract truth through consideration. According to Habian, humans ‘discuss’ and thereby ‘know’ principle, right and wrong, good and bad. This is the function of human beings, the purpose of human beings, the human way of living. This is the root of Habian’s conception of the centrality of human ethics. This conception of human ethics is intimately related to Habian’s conception of ‘knowledge’. The reference to the Confucian virtues of benevolence, justice, custom, knowledge and faith seen in the above quote is repeated a number of times in Myōtei Mondō, but the prevalence of the phrases ‘know the principle’ and ‘discuss right and wrong, good and bad’ in the text is striking. From the very first explanation of the division between different anima categories in Myōtei Mondō it is emphasized that anima sensibilis ‘thinks and feels but does not know the principle’, whereas rationalis ‘knows the principle of things, and possesses the wisdom to discuss right and wrong’.29 Confucian and Buddhist influence in this aspect of Habian’s ethical thought is strongly alluded to not only by his use of overtly Confucian terms like ‘benevolence, justice, custom, knowledge and faith’, and ‘know the principle’ (the Neo-Confucian li 理), but also by the language he uses to make his arguments about nature and function, or what in Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism is called the theory of form and function 体用説 (Jp. taiyōsetsu; Ch. tiyongshou).

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That importance of human beings individually discerning the knowledge of principle, right and wrong, good and bad, is a dominant theme running through Myōtei Mondō from beginning to end. This view of ethical thought is integrated into his argument over creation through his use of anima categories and his emphasis on the differentiation between God and substantia. It is thereby intimately linked to his criticism of other traditions. This argument is also central to the text’s main purpose, the propagation of Christianity. That is because the human capacity for the discernment of knowledge is directly linked to the attainment of the afterlife, which is the main carrot offered through Christianity. At first glance, Myōtei Mondō seems to be dominated by discussion of creation, but the core argument of the text, certainly in terms of its primary function as a text aimed at conversion, is its discussion of individual ethical capacity, which yields the capacity for afterlife. In this sense, Habian’s ‘Christian thought’ focuses more on what we might call the humanist ethical side of Christianity, emphasizing subjective thought, and less on the more superstitious side of that thought, which emphasizes action by externalized forces such as God, angels and the Church hierarchy.

Dochirina Kirishitan: hierarchy, faith and sin Is Habian’s work representative of the general nature of ‘Japanese Christian thought’ in the Japan of this time? The answer of most modern specialists, particularly those who represent the dominant ‘Christian history’ school and have done most of the groundbreaking work in this area, is a very firm no. In fact, these scholars have been rather merciless in arguing that elements of Habian’s thought diverging from what they regard as ‘Christian doctrine’ simply expose the foundations of his later apostasy by showing Habian’s ‘limits of understanding’, caused by the ‘shallowness of his faith’.30 Together with Myōtei Mondō, printed in 1605, probably the most referenced and contemporaneously most widely distributed Japanese printed Christian text was Dochirina Kirishitan. This text was printed in two different versions, one in 1591 and one in 1600. Dochirina Kirishitan, particularly the later version, shared much in common with Myōtei Mondō, not only in terms of its period of production, but also in terms of its purpose and style: propagation of Christianity through comparison with other religions. Like Myōtei Mondō, Dochirina Kirishitan is a dialogue. An interesting difference, however, is that while the dialogue in Myōtei Mondō is between two equals, in Dochirina Kirishitan it is between a ‘master’ and a ‘disciple’. Also, because Dochirina Kirishitan was produced under the supervision of the Jesuit Inspector General of the East Indies, Alexandro Valignano (1539–1606), it is often held up in contrast to Myōtei Mondō (particularly by ‘Christian historians’), as an example of a more ‘orthodox’ – and thereby representative – Japanese Christian text. When we start speaking of what is ‘truly representative’ in terms of what is ‘orthodox’, however, we move onto dangerous ground. Simply accepting the fact that both these texts and others operated in the same context, and were identified

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with and produced by the same organization, probably offers a more grounded basis upon which to begin our examination of the relationship between them. Indeed looking at the differences and similarities between Christian texts of this period in an open manner is the best way to grasp any totality which may have existed in what has come to be referred to as ‘Japanese Christian thought’. Certainly there is no doubt that Dochirina Kirishitan’s approach to knowledge and human discernment is markedly different to that in Myōtei Mondō. This object for which we have faith and reverence is a righteousness that rises above the reach of human knowledge and reason, it is the goodness which we call fides.31 As Myōtei Mondō uses Japanized renderings of Latin terms rather than translation to render words like substantia, so too Dochirina Kirishitan uses a Japanese phonetic representation of the Latin fides to represent faith. The importance of fides as the core of Christian teachings is emphasized repeatedly throughout Dochirina Kirishitan. Disciple: What is a Christian? Master: Someone who not only accepts fides by committing their heart to the holy teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ, but who also manifests fides in their words and deeds.32 In Dochirina Kirishitan, the core of ‘being Christian’ is faith and action in accordance with fides. In Myōtei Mondō, action in accordance with anima rationalis was instead emphasized. There is also, however, a discussion of an exclusively human anima in Dochirina Kirishitan; but the characteristics of this anima seem quite different to those outlined in Myōtei Mondō. In Dochirina Kirishitan, as in Myōtei Mondō, anima rationalis is presented as a part of the process by which human beings gain the possibility of salvation. But the nature of that ‘Christian anima’ is quite different to the nature of the anima rationalis described by Habian. In Myōtei Mondō, anima rationalis is identified in terms of ‘discerning wisdom’ (funbetsu chie 分別知恵) and ‘knowing the principle’ (ri wo shiru 理を 知る), whereas in Dochirina Kirishitan the same anima is identified in terms of a ‘faith and reverence’ which ‘transcends human knowledge’ (the exact definition of fides in the same text). Whereas Myōtei Mondō’s definition of anima rationalis emphasizes abstract knowledge, in Dochirina Kirishitan anima is seen as what transcends human knowledge by displacing it with faith. Moreover, the nature of the role of faith is described squarely in terms of the function of the ‘Holy Church’, the Church hierarchy, in mediating the will of God. Disciple: What is fides? Master: As God’s will is indicated to us through the Holy Church, our firm faith and reverence, the Good illuminated by the shining light of Grace which

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Japanese Christian thought transcends human knowledge has been given us by God through the Christian anima [rationalis].33

The concept of faith is also linked closely in Dochirina Kirishitan to an emphasis on the role of grace, which although in the above quote is translated into Japanese as go’on ご恩, is represented through most of the text by the word garasa ガラサ, a Japanese phonetic rendering of the Portuguese rendering (graça) of the Latin gratia. Although ‘grace’, like ‘faith’, is a word that appears repeatedly as a point of emphasis throughout Dochirina Kirishitan, it appears only once in Myōtei Mondō. The concept of grace is introduced in Dochirina Kirishitan as, like faith, an indispensable prerequisite to becoming a Christian. Master: Now let me ask you a question. Do you know what kind of person’s actions allow them to become a Christian? Disciple: One becomes a Christian with the Grace of God. Master: What does ‘with the Grace of God’ mean? Disciple: I have not yet learnt this, would you please teach me? Master: One does not attain the Grace of God by the power of your own or your parents’ works. One becomes a Christian by the mercy of God shown through the triumph of our Lord Jesus Christ.34 In other words, one does not become a Christian through one’s own or other peoples’ actions, but only through the historical action of God himself in the person of Jesus Christ. Salvation is made possible through the agency of God in the created world (the forgiveness of sin through crucifixion), not simply through creation. In Myōtei Mondō salvation is mentioned, but generally in terms of salvation from death by Christian faith. Dochirina Kirishitan emphasizes the idea of original sin. ‘Salvation’ is not simply salvation from death, it is primarily salvation from sin (toga 科) and the devil (tengu 天狗). The overall presentation of the role of human beings in Dochirina Kirishitan does not see them as subjectively ‘debating over good and evil’ (as in Myōtei Mondō), but rather sees them as objects being acted upon by the major sources of interventionary agency in the world: God and Satan. Human beings can do little more than hold on tight to their charms and crucifixes as they are buffeted by these superhuman forces. Master: There is nothing more important than to respect the Light of Our Lord Jesus Christ by revering the cross and bringing our mind entirely to the heart of faith. Because we humbly wish sin to be forgiven, there is nothing for it but to humbly try to hold up the cross. Disciple: What is meant by ‘making ourselves free’? Master: We who have become the prisoners of the devil [can become free by] being pardoned from the place of slaves [Hell]. Disciple: Why do you say [we are] prisoners? Master: We and the devil are the slaves of sin. The Lord declared us to be the slaves of the devil after we sinned against his Word. Thereby, when we

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commit a mortal sin, because we have submitted to the devil [by sinning] we become his slave. But, by following the path of raising up the cross, by taking baptism and reverently taking the sacrament of confession, people may by the grace of God be forgiven all sins, and thereby through the power of the cross our Lord Jesus Christ takes back [takes on for us] the thing that made us slaves of the devil. By taking back what made us slaves, [He] made us free. This is the true greatness [of Jesus].35 In this manner, rather than emphasizing human beings’ own thoughts and actions in the created world, Dochirina Kirishitan presents not only a more superstitious view, but also one placing less emphasis on ethics and knowledge and more on individual faith. Interestingly, considering the time of writing, Dochirina Kirishitan, despite being regarded as the more ‘orthodox Catholic’ text in comparison with Myōtei Mondō, seems rather Protestant in its promotion of purely religious practice at the expense of ethical thought and action. Dochirina’s general tendency towards emphasis on original sin and a negative view of the world and the body also follow this trend. Disciple: What kinds of things are our enemy? Master: The world, the devil, the body, these things.36 Here Dochirina makes it abundantly clear that the world and the body are enemies. Conversely, although Myōtei Mondō argues that if a thing possesses a worldly function and no other, then that thing cannot attain the afterlife, it does not thereby argue that worldly things are inherently evil. In Dochirina Kirishitan, however, there is no doubt. Due to the first sin inherited from Adam, the flesh [physical body] is born with sin.37 Myōtei Mondō’s reference to the question of original sin, however, is much more ambivalent. While stating that because of Adam’s sin human beings do not automatically ‘receive the help’ of God in attaining the afterlife, it does not say that human beings are born with sin, nor does it categorically state that human beings cannot attain the afterlife without the help of God.38 Dochirina Kirishitan’s explanation of the nature of salvation, however, relies completely on the concept of original sin. Human beings attain the afterlife only by forgiveness as the action of God. The only steps they can take to secure forgiveness relate to the sacraments of the Church, in particular baptism and confession. Influenced by their varying approaches to the role of original sin and salvation, the approaches of Myōtei Mondō and Dochirina Kirishitan to the centrality of the sacraments are also different. Myōtei Mondō’s approach to the sacraments verges on relativism.

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Japanese Christian thought To enter the road to assistance [in salvation], in Christian teachings you take what is called baptism. If you take just this sacrament, follow the ten commandments of this religion, and respect and revere God, then you can relax now and be sure of an afterlife in Heaven.39

If you follow ‘just this sacrament’ you can ‘be sure’ of the afterlife. There is no mention, and indeed the tone of the text suggests in no way whatsoever, that you will surely burn in Hell if you do not do these things. To sum up, there are three key points on which Dochirina Kirishitan and Myōtei Mondō disagree. First, there is the issue of original sin and the resultant negative view of the world and the body. This is emphasized in Dochirina Kirishitan and central to its main argument about the nature of salvation. In Myōtei Mondō, on the other hand, this argument is hardly present. Second, the basic road to the afterlife relies in Dochirina Kirishitan on Christ’s crucifixion as the act of salvation, and the sacraments of the church as the representation of that salvation in the contemporary world; in Myōtei Mondō, by contrast, the nature of anima rationalis is attributed to human beings by God in creation. This almost represents an argument of original good versus one of original evil. Third, Dochirina Kirishitan emphasizes above all else ‘faith’ – faith in God, through Jesus Christ, through the Church hierarchy and its sacraments. In Myōtei Mondō, by contrast, the emphasis is on ‘knowledge’ – knowledge of abstracted ethical rightness as truth, the attainment of which is the function of human beings attributed by God through anima rationalis. Other Japanese Kirishitan texts authored by the European hierarchy in Japan and used there for propagation of the religion show similarities to the emphasis on the role of faith, the Church hierarchy and the sacraments seen in Dochirina Kirishitan. For instance, Kirishitan kokoroegaki 吉利支丹心得書 takes a negative view of the world and the human body that is particularly similar to Dochirina. There are three enemies which pull us towards evil: the world, the body, the devil.40 A negative view of knowledge in comparison with faith is also a theme of this text and others printed in 1605 (the same year as Myōtei Mondō), for instance Sakaramenta teiyōfuroku サカラメンタ提要付録.41 Other texts of this kind published around this time, for instance Gopashon no kannen 御パションの観 念 of 1607, are not necessarily as negative about either the world or knowledge as Dochirina Kirishitan, but nevertheless tend to emphasize the role of grace rather than anima in salvation, and thereby the agency of God over human beings.42 In the range of Japanese printed Christian texts produced for the purpose of propagation of the faith in the first years of the 1600s, therefore, there lay a diversity of opinion on the central issue of salvation. The major difference was between opinions that emphasized human agency and action by relying on anima, of which Myōtei Mondō is the clearest example, and others, making up the majority, that emphasized interventionist action by God.

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The arguments presented within this latter group of texts, however, also demonstrated some diversity. In the highly influential yet extreme example of Dochirina Kirishitan, human knowledge, indeed almost human existence, is treated so negatively that human ethics or the possibility of good action arising from human thought are all but negated. Other texts such as Gopashon no kannen emphasized grace and God’s agency, but did not necessarily negate human thought or mysticism.

Internal Japanese Jesuit texts: scholasticism and humanism If there is such diversity in the texts written by Jesuits in Japan for propagation of the faith, and therefore for outsiders, what about texts written for use inside the Order, for education of the brothers? These texts were written or translated by European Jesuits in Japan. It could be argued, therefore, that these texts should not really be considered ‘Japanese Christian texts’, not only because they were written by Europeans, but also because they only functioned (were read and used) in social structures completely controlled by them (the Jesuit academies). Nevertheless, reference to these texts can be of great assistance in understanding the nature and meaning of the diversity in the public Japanese Christian texts examined above: through these texts, we can see how elements of Christian theology and indeed scholastic philosophy were linked, developed and explained in the education undergone by the likes of Habian. The best example of this kind of text is by the head of the Japanese subprovince of the Jesuits, Pedro Gomez (1535–1600), entitled Compendium of Catholic Doctrine.43 Ide Katsumi has identified this, together with Valignano’s edition of Japan’s Catechism, as texts probably read by Habian during his time as a seminarian.44 Furthermore, Gomez’s Compendium of Catholic Doctrine stands as the most extensive Jesuit text in Japanese we have extant, and was seemingly the basis for theological education in the Japanese Jesuit colleges. An examination of this text reveals how theological issues of revealed religion were related to scholastic concepts like anima rationalis and the importance of human knowledge in the orthodox discourse carried on inside the Japanese Jesuit schools. This relationship between Christian doctrine and anima theory was established in these texts in a particular way that attributed to them a particular political meaning. In the Compendium there is a passage where Gomez makes perfectly clear the relationship between anima rationalis and fides that was taught at this time. What makes a human being is the possession of three illuminations [anima]. The first is the illumination of sensibilis, which can also be said to be weak, it is what is communicated by our senses, it is the illumination of sight, hearing, smell and taste. … This is possessed by beasts, animals, insects, fish and humans. The second is the illumination of rationalis. Because this allows us to discern spiritual things which sensibilis cannot, it is better than sensibilis in many respects. Things which this illumination can well discern include: God,

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Japanese Christian thought angels, right and wrong, and so on. The third is the illumination of fides. With fides we believe in things outside the realm of nature, things which cannot be discerned by human beings. The trinity, and so on. Therefore, someone who possesses only the illumination of sensibilis is the same as a beast. Someone who possesses illumination beyond sensibilis, the illumination of discernment [anima rationalis], and by this does good deeds in the world of men, should be called a good person. Seneca or Plato were examples of this kind of person. A person who beyond this reveres the illumination of fides is a Christian. Only Christians receive the grace of God. For this reason, there is a hierarchical relationship between these three illuminations. Fides is the top illumination. The illumination of discernment (rationalis) is in the middle. The illumination of sensibilis is at the bottom.45

This division and explanation of the anima relations resembles Habian’s, with one big exception, the role of fides. Gomez introduces fides as a category above anima rationalis, thereby subjugating human thought to faith in a hierarchical relationship. But he does more than that: he also clearly identifies the content of this highest category as relating to the ‘mysteries of faith’, such as the trinity, for which (it was contemporaneously argued, as we saw in Dochirina Kirishitan) there was no basis of explanation other than the Church hierarchy. Furthermore, he grades human existence in terms of the possession of these three categories. So he not only emphasizes faith over human knowledge, he also defines faith in a manner that subjugates the humanist elements to hierarchy-determined doctrine. This means that the ideas of the trinity, and forgiveness – two issues emphasized by Ide as ‘cores of Christian faith and Christian theology overlooked by Habian’ – are presented in Compendium in such a way as to seriously slant their meanings.46 Gomez does not primarily use the concept of the trinity to emphasize the inherent potential sanctity of the human being, nor does he use the concept of forgiveness to emphasize the virtue of human sympathy. Instead the mysteries of faith are used for exactly the opposite purpose, to argue against the potentiality of human sanctity and rather for subjugation of the humanist ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’ type teachings inherent in the mysteries of faith. The aspects of these ‘mysteries of faith’ which emphasize the sacred or Godly within the human being are skipped over, the mysteries instead being used to subjugate the human soul to a hierarchy-determined rule-based doctrine. Looking from the position of humanist ethics, this means that Gomez’s use of anima categories works in almost exactly the opposite way to Habian’s. Habian delineates human beings (as a category) from other animals to emphasize their shared ability to think about ethical issues; Gomez divides human beings themselves into higher, middle and lower groups. The basic conflict between Habian and Gomez could be characterized as a conflict between two different conceptions of ethics: Habian’s ethical position emphasizes the potential of human good (one that today might be called a ‘Christian humanist ethics’);

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Gomez instead takes a negative approach to humanity, emphasizing original sin to uphold Church hierarchy. Of course, from a modern theological perspective it is easy to see that the mysteries of faith, with their inherent emphasis on human sanctity and sympathy, could have been employed by Habian to argue his own side in this conflict. But given the way Habian himself had been taught about the mysteries of faith by the likes of Gomez, it is no wonder that Habian did not see the mysteries of faith as something he could use to support his argument. The Compendium thereby goes some way to explaining the issues of theological interpretation lying behind the diversity in the Japanese Christian thought of this time.47 The question of how the Aristotelian anima categories and the logic behind them should be fused with aspects of biblical revelation, and the political and ethical consequences of that question, lay at the heart of that diversity. The political and ethical consequences of this conflict related back to whether ethical action was determined by thought based on individual knowledge and discernment, or rather on obedience to sociopolitically (hierarchically) determined rules.

Ricci’s Chinese Christianity: Confucianism meets Christ This conflict is also seen in another text which, although written and published in China, also came to influence Christian thought in Korea and Japan.48 It was written by a figure famous for his attempt at a synthetic resolution of the Christian and Confucian traditions, an attempt which also ultimately engaged, or at least came to be argued in terms of, issues related to the role of Church hierarchy in determining Christian truth.49 The Italian-born Chinese Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci is remembered today for his major role in the introduction of Christianity and elements of European/Middle Eastern science and philosophy to China, for his introduction of Confucian thought to Europe, and for his attempt to integrate Christianity and Confucianism.50 The effect of Ricci’s work, however, was not restricted to China and Europe. In 1603 he authored what would become his most famous religious text Tianzhu Shiyi 天主實義 (Jp. Tenshu Jitsugi). This text was imported to Japan around 1605, and though seemingly not immediately propagated widely, had at least by the 1640s become the most referenced Jesuit work in Japan. In the mid-seventeenth century, at least in terms of the discourse of the reception of Christian thought, Tianzhu Shiyi was a central text, considered part of the same Christian discourse as Myōtei Mondō and Dochirina Kirishitan.51 It is important to note, however, that while in mid-seventeenth century and later Japanese anti-Christian discourse Tianzhu Shiyi, Myōtei Mondō and Dochirina Kirishitan were represented as part of the same ‘Christian thought’ category, in reality they were not. Tianzhu Shiyi was not only produced in a separate country to Myōtei Mondō and Dochirina Kirishitan, it was also not actively propagated by the European Jesuits in Japan because they generally disapproved of Ricci’s approach.52 Tianzhu Shiyi became popular in Japan only after the suppression of Japanese Christianity. As texts such as Myōtei Mondō and Dochirina Kirishitan became less

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available due to the eradication of the Jesuit presence in Japan and the suppression of Japanese Christian objects (including texts), conversely Tianzhu Shiyi, still being printed in China, became the more readily available representative text of Christianity in Japan. As the seventeenth century progressed, Tianzhu Shiyi’s role in anti-Christian discourse became increasingly central. Because most early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse was written after the 1630s, when Tianzhu Shiyi had become the most readily available Christian text, anti-Christian writers like Hayashi Razan or Arai Hakuseki 新井白石 (1657–1725) consistently identified ‘Christian’ thought through reference (sometimes exclusively) to Ricci texts. Indeed, by the mid-Tokugawa period, with the ban on Christian books in place, and after a long period of suppression of Christian activity in Japan, clandestine copies of Ricci imported from China and Korea were the closest thing present to any real source of what ‘Christians’ thought. It seems fairly clear that Habian never saw Tianzhu Shiyi before he produced Myōtei Mondō, nor does it seem he had even seen it by 1620 when he produced his anti-Christian text Hadaiusu.53 But there are nonetheless similarities between Myōtei Mondō and Tianzhu Shiyi, many shared by other Christian texts discussed above: for instance, the use of a question-and-answer format and the employment of scholastic philosophy. The centrality of anima categories to the argument of Tianzhu Shiyi is obvious from the very beginning of the text. In explicating the universal teachings of the Catholic religion, Ricci primarily emphasizes the reason that humans and beasts are different. There is no greater cause of the difference between human beings and beasts than the soul. The soul is what discerns right and wrong and differentiates between true and false. It is difficult to deceive it with anything that lacks rationality. The stupidity of animals is such that although they are capable of sense and movement in much the same way as humans, they are incapable of understanding the principles of causality.54 What I have translated here from Ricci’s Chinese term 霊才 (Ch. lingcai, Jp. reisai) to the English ‘soul’ of course stands for the anima of Myōtei Mondō. As in Myōtei Mondō, Tianzhu Shiyi also describes the anima of animals as having the capacity for ‘sense and movement’.55 As in Myōtei Mondō, the capacity of human beings is held to exceed that of animals. The reason given for the superiority of human beings relates to their capacity for judgement given through their anima. But although Tianzhu Shiyi agrees with Myōtei Mondō here in terms of the importance of anima, the two texts disagree sharply over how anima is imparted to human beings. Myōtei Mondō portrays anima as imparted to human beings in a single act of God during the reproductive process. In the womb of the mother, the father’s seed is received. It is within this physicality that God creates people’s anima rationalis. The anima rationalis then becomes the master of this physicality (body) and directs the body in line with reason, hoping to then live on into the afterlife.56

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In Tianzhu Shiyi, however, the process through which God, human beings and their souls are related is much more complex. As in Myōtei Mondō, the anima of Tianzhu Shiyi is given by an externalized God to an internalized human self. In Tianzhu Shiyi, however, the external and internal are related through the use of Aristotle’s doctrine of four causes: If we are to speak of the causes of things, we must see that there are four. What are these four? There is maker, form, matter and end. The maker is what creates the object, turning it into the thing it should be. The form shapes a thing, giving it its fitting category, differentiating it from other kinds of things. Matter is the substance that the object is made from. That which takes on the form. The end is the determined function the object is made for. … Within the four, form and matter, these two are internal to things. They are the basis of things, what is called Yin and Yang. Maker and end, these two are external to the thing. They exist prior to the thing.57 If we look at the problem of anima in terms of this interpretation of the doctrine of four causes we see that the creator is an externalized God, and that the form is an internalized soul (anima). As Ricci continues his explication of the doctrine of four causes we can see that unlike in Myōtei Mondō, where after the act of birth anima rationalis acts independently of creation, in Tianzhu Shiyi it remains tied to God. In terms of the causes of things, there are those included which are internal to things, like Yin and Yang. There are also those which are external, like the maker category. God’s creation of things therefore, as it is the Lordly Creation, is external. So God can be ‘in’ a thing, but He is not part of the thing. Being ‘in’ a thing is like something being ‘in’ a place. Like someone’s garden being ‘in’ their house. Or like how some objects have components to them. Like how arms and legs are parts of the body is like how people are made up of Yin and Yang. Dependent things rely on something else which is autonomous to exist. Like how a white horse comprises a horse which is white, and cold ice comprises ice which is cold. For a thing to exist something must precede its existence to cause it to exist. The sunlight must shine to create refractions in a crystal, there must be fire to make metal glow red.58 In other words, while God and soul are not the same, they are related in a relationship like the ‘dependent’ and ‘autonomous’, or the sun and reflected light. This is the theoretical basis of the link in Tianzhu Shiyi between God’s ‘creation of heaven, earth and all things’ and his ‘periodic intervention in and control of this’ created world.59 In this way Tianzhu Shiyi portrays God’s presence and action in the created world in a way not seen in Myōtei Mondō. In Tianzhu Shiyi, God is present and acting. So although Tianzhu Shiyi and Myōtei Mondō are similar in their emphasis on the role of knowledge and their refusal to base their explication of Christianity

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on a concept of faith reliant on Church authority, the two texts differ on the key issue of where they see God acting in the universe. This is related to differences in the way they explicate the systems of scholastic-mediated Aristotelian philosophy through which they describe creation and its outcomes. But there are further important differences and similarities to be found in the way both texts employ Confucian philosophy. As mentioned earlier, in Myōtei Mondō Habian uses Confucian terms, comments favourably on Confucianism’s ethical outlook, and uses logical structures and terms which were current in contemporaneous Confucian writing. These notable aspects of Habian’s work clearly show similarities with Ricci’s use of Confucianism. But Ricci’s use of Confucianism was more overt and central. For instance, both Habian and Ricci employ quotations from the Confucian classics to criticize elements of Song metaphysics. But Ricci goes further than that by employing quotes from the Confucian canon to prove his own arguments relating to the existence of the Christian God.60 Not only does he argue that the original works of the Confucian canon do not support the metaphysics taught by Confucians in the contemporary China of the Ming dynasty, he further argues that the Confucian texts actually refer to the Christian creator God. For instance, Ricci attacks the basis of the Song metaphysical thesis of creation, the concept of the ‘Supreme Ultimate’,61 by mentioning the importance of a more ancient term in the Confucian canon, Shangdi 上帝. Although I arrived in China late in life, I have assiduously studied the [Chinese] classics. I have heard that the superior men of ancient times worshipped and revered The Lord of Heaven [Shangdi], but I have never heard of them worshipping and revering the Supreme Ultimate. If the Supreme Ultimate was the Lord of Heaven and origin of all things, why did the ancient sages not say so?62 Ricci paid attention to the role of the term Shangdi in the more ancient Chinese texts and argued that Shangdi was the name used by the Chinese ancient sages for what the Jesuits called Tianzhu 天主 (Jp. Tenshu), ‘God’. What in my country is called the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu), is in Chinese called Shangdi. … Our Tianzhu [God] is what the ancient [Chinese Confucian] canonical texts call Shangdi. In the Doctrine of the Mean, Confucius says, ‘The rites of sacrifice are meant to serve Shangdi.’ … [Ricci then goes on to quote many other examples from a range of Confucian classic texts before concluding that:] Reading the ancient texts, it is clear that the only difference between Shangdi and Tianzhu is the name.63 Ricci’s use of Shangdi, however, represented more than a simple equivalent to God in Chinese Confucian literature. Ricci also used this concept to emphasize the agency of Tianzhu touched on earlier. On a number of occasions in Tianzhu Shiyi, Ricci uses references in the classics to Shangdi to argue that Tianzhu/God is

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an active agent in the lives of people. For instance, in the following passage Ricci uses the Confucius Analects passage, ‘If you sin against Shangdi, there is nowhere to [turn to] pray’, to posit the agency of Tianzhu through its ability to offer rewards and punishments in this world and the next.64 To commit a crime against Shangdi is the most serious crime. … Tianzhu grasps the actions of every person in the world, and there has never been an occasion when virtues or crimes have not received their just rewards.65 Through his exposition of the connection of the anima categories, and in his direct discussion of the agency of God (as presented through the Confucian classics) as Shangdi, Ricci links the action of God to the world of human affairs. Whereas in Myōtei Mondō this connection is demonstrated primarily through the act of creation and the attribution of anima at birth (the creation of each human being), in the case of Tianzhu Shiyi God’s continued agency in the created world is explained in terms of Aristotle’s doctrine of four causes. God’s power both in this world and the next is further emphasized through the explication of God as Shangdi.

Ricci and Habian: two discourses, two worlds Ricci’s and Habian’s explanations of Christianity share many aspects. They both use a question-and-answer format to promote Christianity; they both systematically address the teachings of other religious traditions; and they both integrate elements of Confucian thought into their own explanation of scholastic philosophy. But they differ primarily in how they address the key question of how to deal with God’s agency in the scholastic system. But of course, this was not an interpretive problem unique to Christianity in Japan. In contemporaneous Catholic theology in the Western hemisphere, indeed since at least Ibn Rushd’s treatment of similar problems in Islamic theology and Thomas Aquinas’s utilization of Rushd in the foundation of scholasticism in the thirteenth-century, theological conflicts had been centred on questions related to the integration of philosophy and revealed religion. In late sixteenth-century, Aristotelian early seventeenth-century Europe conflicts over how to integrate philosophy and science with Christian theological teachings continued. Jesuits were also centrally involved in these controversies.66 This was thereby a problem inherent in the scholastic fusion of Christian doctrine and Aristotelian philosophy. One might liken this problem to an intellectual landmine lying at the heart of the religious tradition Habian inherited. For Habian, this problematic lay embedded but concealed within the scholastic system as presented to him by the European Jesuits in Japan. As we saw from some of the Japanese Christian texts examined above, Jesuits in Japan such as Valignano and Gomez tended to answer the questions arising from this problem by emphasizing authority and doctrinal orthodoxy justified through faith, rather than by providing comprehensive rational explanations. Habian had been told simply to ‘believe’ by

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a small group of European Jesuits on the periphery of the Catholic world, whose main aim was to preserve their authority over the perhaps threateningly intelligent and erudite Japanese brothers such as Habian. Understandably, given Habian’s clear thirst for knowledge and ability in argument, this answer did not do. Ricci, on the other hand, had been offered the tools for addressing this problem during his education in Italy. As a young man Ricci had been educated at the Collegium Romanum, not only in philosophy and theology to the highest level, but also in subjects like astronomy by teachers such as the defender of Galileo, Christoph Clavius S. J. In such environments, issues relating to how to integrate Church teachings and academic advances were constantly debated.67 Ricci thereby had access to a range of arguments that had already been extrapolated in Catholic theological paradigms, and he was also used to working within this kind of discourse. His use of the doctrine of four causes to synthesize anima theory with the idea of an interventionist God justified in terms of Shangdi is an example of his employment of this early European education in his later writings in Chinese. The fact that Habian did not deal with these problems in the same way is very understandable given not only the particular slant of the scholastic education he underwent, but moreover his generally more diverse and assumedly more self-taught intellectual development. Although we cannot be sure of his early intellectual development, we can see from Myōtei Mondō that by the age of 25 or so Habian had acquired broad knowledge of a range of traditions including Buddhism, Confucianism and of course Jesuit-mediated Christianity and scholastic philosophy. But the knowledge of Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto seems to have been primarily acquired autodidactically.68 Habian was also working in a late sixteenth-/early seventeenth-century Japanese society that not only had great religious diversity, but where there was no accepted politico-religious orthodoxy. In this respect, Japan, where Habian spent his entire life, was quite different to both of Ricci’s homes in southern Europe and Ming China, both of which possessed intellectual orthodoxies that were intimately related to the political orders. Ricci had for the first 34 years of his life learnt in one integrated system of thought in Europe. Then even after his arrival in China, he could afford to concentrate on the teachings of just one other tradition, Confucianism, which in Ming China possessed an accepted systematized orthodoxy shaped by the state examination system. Habian did not have this luxury. I would argue that Ricci’s background of dealing in a concentrated form with just two doctrinal orthodoxies, compared with Habian’s experience of having to imbibe a range of traditions simultaneously, was critical – as was the fact that Ricci’s educational background in scholastic philosophy was more diversified, giving him the capacity to take more nuanced critical approaches to issues like the mysteries of faith. The fact that Ricci was used to operating in intellectual environments in both Europe and China where one tradition of knowledge was held up as doctrine, meant that he was also perhaps better equipped for the task of integrating ideas into a doctrinal framework. Perhaps the reason that up until now Ricci’s work has attracted such praise while Habian’s work has usually been described as ‘flawed’

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is that the more established doctrinal categories that Ricci used – ‘Confucianism’, ‘scholasticism’ and ‘Christianity’ – are closer to the ones within which academics still operate today. Ricci used categories the traditions of which have survived. His work thereby demonstrates continuity with past and present discourses that were often institutionalized doctrinally in both Church and academy. Modern readers can thereby comparatively easily understand the categories of ‘scholastic philosophy’ and ‘Confucianism’ that Ricci uses.

Conclusion: Christianity in Japan – a broad church The examination above has demonstrated that the range of texts generally identified as early ‘Japanese Christian thought’ possessed a high degree of diversity. Quite different approaches were taken to a wide array of key questions of philosophy and faith. The comparative and contextualized examination of these different approaches presented above demonstrates the nature of the conflict between these different positions, both among different texts authored in Japan, and between these texts and those imported from China. That examination has also shown that some Japanese Christian thought, and indeed some Chinese Christian thought popularized in Japan, overlapped and interacted with Confucian intellectual arguments current in these areas. As pointed out in previous research, the Habian of Myōtei Mondō did indeed place less emphasis on the idea of faith, aspects of revealed religion, and the construct of the mysteries of faith than did some other writers of Japanese Christian texts. But the representation of these ideas in those other competing Japanese Christian texts, such as Valignano’s Dochirina Kirishitan, was also slanted: these texts equated faith in God to faith in the Church hierarchy alone. The general arguments of these texts negated the sanctity of both created nature and human beings, thereby removing the doctrinal elements which supported a positive view of human thought, knowledge and discernment. Gomez’s Compendium of Catholic Doctrine demonstrates that the doctrinal education carried out within the Jesuit academies in Japan presented a particular approach to the idea of faith, the mysteries of faith, and the consequent philosophical issues of human ethics, freedom and autonomy which backed up the kind of authoritarian approach seen in Dochirina Kirishitan. In Compendium, anima categories as the basis for a scholastic creation theory are presented in a manner that emphasizes the division between different categories of people and the subordination of human thought and knowledge to church hierarchy. Reference to Tianzhu Shiyi, by showing the more nuanced, integrated and open approach of Ricci, highlights the conservatism and particularism of the approach of the European Jesuits in Japan. The approach of the European leadership of the Jesuits in Japan, in particular through their definition of ‘faith’, in effect limited the capacity of figures such as Habian to conceive of solutions in the manner Ricci did. The Japan-based Europeans’ definition of ‘faith’ eliminated the mysteries of faith as a possible means of bridging the gap between Confucian and Aristotelian philosophies on the one hand, and Christian revealed religion on the other.

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What both Ricci and Habian did possess, and the European leadership of the Jesuits in Japan lacked, was a real understanding of non-Christian thought, of other conceptual frameworks functioning in their environment (in particular Confucian thought). This understanding gave Ricci and Habian the potential to relativize their positions; not to become relativists, but to place their ideas within a contextual relationship to the intellectual currents of the places they were in. Because Ricci had control both of the texts and of the political direction of the Jesuit order in the part of China he lived in, he was able to realize this potential: he was able to present Christianity, not in any relativist manner, but as absolute truth, albeit related to the intellectual context of his time and place. Habian did not have any control over the policy direction of the Jesuits in Japan and had to function without even the most basic authority of ordination. His writings, even when he was a Jesuit, stood not so much alongside the conservative Japanese Jesuit works like Dochirina Kirishitan, as in some respects in competition with them; in competition with thought that was much less integrated with contemporary arguments. The conflict then inherent within ‘early period Japanese Christian thought’ was certainly not a cultural or philosophical conflict between West and East. If it could be described at all in terms of a duality, it might best be described as a political conflict between doctrinaire authoritarians and socially integrated realists. The fact that Habian did not deal with knowledge by adapting it to doctrinal norms has often been blamed on his ‘lack of ability to grasp’ Christian truths.69 But it is difficult to understand the logic of such attacks on Habian. When examining the reaction of a young intelligent seeker in the Japan of the late 1500s and early 1600s to a huge diversity of religious and philosophical thought, which he was digesting during the climax of a period of long-running total civil war, our priority is surely not to judge the level to which his ideas conformed to an artificially created doctrinal orthodoxy authenticated in Rome. Unlike Ricci, Habian had no choice but to attempt to understand the intellectual traditions he was dealing with in a culture of religious, intellectual and political diversity and multiplicity. For much of Habian’s life, continuing civil war meant there was no centre of political authority, never mind a centre of religious, intellectual or other doctrinal authority. It should therefore be no surprise that the intellectual direction of Myōtei Mondō, and indeed of much other Japanese Christian thought, does not conform perfectly to accepted doctrinal orthodox descriptions of ‘Christianity’, nor indeed of ‘scholastic philosophy’, ‘NeoConfucianism’ or any other such doctrinal category. But that certainly does not mean that Habian’s ideas as expressed in Myōtei Mondō were, as Hayashi Razan asserted, ‘verbose rantings’;70 or by any means, as Ebisawa argued, ‘shallow’.71 Rather, it makes Habian’s ideas an important key to understanding the way people thought in the socially and intellectually dynamic place and period into which Habian was born and lived. His ideas represent a moment, a spark during which in the Japanese archipelago of Habian’s time there existed very briefly together, in competition and syncretism, a wide range of intellectual religious traditions – many of them operating outside hierarchical

Japanese Christian thought

33

authority and doctrinal orthodoxy, and in a society where order was momentary. Perhaps this might lead us to conclude whether rather than Japanese Christian thought being considered an offshoot of something called ‘Western thought’, it should perhaps instead be viewed as one facet of the intellectual and religious diversity of Japan at that time. To complete the task of putting Japanese anti-Christian discourse into context, we must now further flesh out the nature of the intellectual and religious diversity from which it emerged, and further inquire into the trajectory of change within that diversity at the time of the onset of anti-Christian discourse in the seventeenth century.

2

Japanese Confucianism and Japanese Christianity Parallels and interactions

Early Tokugawa thought is often characterized as moving away from the spiritualism of the Warring States period to a more ‘rational’ inclination. Changes that occurred in Japanese Buddhist thought at this time, and the advent and popularity of anti-Christian discourse itself have both been described in terms of this paradigm.1 But the perceived flagship of a move towards ‘rationality’ in the early Tokugawa period has always been the rise in the popularity and influence of Confucian thought.2 Interestingly, the increase in popularity and influence of Confucian thought in Japan began not after the banning of Christianity, but simultaneously with the development of indigenous Japanese Christian thought at the turn of the sixteenth into the seventeenth century. Both thought traditions existed briefly together in the same highly diversified and dynamic intellectual climate at the turn of that century. A solid contextualized understanding of both Japanese Christian thought and anti-Christian discourse is therefore aided by an understanding of the interactions and parallels between developments in these two traditions at that time. An examination of the rise of Confucianism in Japan is also vital simply to understand the context within which both Japanese Christian thought peaked, and anti-Christian thought emerged. Just as it was necessary to ascertain the real nature of Japanese Christian thought in the early seventeenth century before assessing the alleged reactions to it, so too it is necessary to examine the reality of what has been held up against it as the ‘rational’ Confucian alternative. Did the Confucian thought of the early Tokugawa period represent an intellectual rupture with ‘mystical’ thought traditions of the past? Was Tokugawa Confucian thought uniformly antithetical to all facets of Japanese Christian thought? Was there any relationship between the changes that occurred within the Japanese Confucian and Christian traditions at this time? This chapter touches on some of these issues through reference to both core Japanese Confucian sources from the period, and texts where Confucian and Christian traditions interacted. Through source research and reference to recent scholarship on the position of Confucian thought in early Tokugawa Japan, this chapter questions some of the assumptions about the nature of early Tokugawa Confucianism that have underlain many previous studies of anti-Christian discourse. In particular, it questions the assumption that Confucianism and

Japanese Confucianism and Japanese Christianity 35 Christianity were completely separate discourses, and the assumption that early Tokugawa Zhu Xi-ist Confucians agreed on some kind of monolithic, unified world view that was unquestioned as orthodoxy.3

Myōtei Mondō: harnessing Confucianism to Christianity One way to demonstrate the elevation of Confucianism in Japanese society at the beginning of the 1600s, and to see its reception in another thought tradition, is to examine changes in the way Confucianism was referred to in Christian texts of this period. The Japanese Christian text that deals most thoroughly with Confucianism is Myōtei Mondō. In context, the most notable aspect of Myōtei Mondō’s discussion of Confucianism is the very existence of that discussion. Although Confucian thought had been present in Japan for many centuries, throughout most of the sixteenth-century Confucianism was taught in Buddhist monasteries and studied by Buddhist monks. The emergence of thinkers who contrasted themselves against Buddhism by identifying themselves as ‘Confucians’ (jusha 儒者), only began at just the time Habian was active in the Jesuits, from the 1590s onwards. When Habian arrived in Kyoto in 1603, he needed to contend not only with multiple Buddhist and Shinto traditions, but also with intellectual competitors who identified themselves as ‘Confucians’.4 Habian’s choice to identify Confucianism overtly, along with Shinto and Buddhism, as one of the three traditions to critique in Myōtei Mondō was clearly driven by the contemporaneous rise of Confucianism in Japan, especially in the intellectual centre of Kyoto. It is interesting to note that in the 1581 Jesuit text Nihon no katekizumo 日本のカテキズモ, only Buddhism and Shinto are critiqued, the word ‘Confucian’ appearing just once. The fact that Confucianism was not identified by the Jesuits in 1581 as a significant intellectual tradition in Japan, yet by 1605 was worth occupying one of three chapters outlining Japanese thought, is itself an interesting comment on the changing face of Japanese thought at this time. The ‘Confucianism’ that Habian identifies in Myōtei Mondō is also clearly the systematic form of Confucianism associated with the metaphysics of thinkers of the Song dynasty – what is often referred to in English as ‘Neo-Confucianism’. In Myōtei Mondō, Habian demonstrates a knowledge of Confucianism well beyond a simple familiarity with the Confucian classics that one might expect of the average educated Buddhist monk. He exhibits a good understanding of the workings of Zhu Xi-ist Confucian metaphysics, quoting not only from the ancient Confucian classics, but also from twelfth century CE works by Zhu Xi including Sishu jizhu 四書集註 (Jp. Shisho shūchū), Jinsilu 近思録 (Jp. Kinshiroku) and Zhuzi wenji 朱子文集 (Jp. Shushi bunshū).5 Habian harshly criticizes the metaphysical systems of Song Confucianism, which sought to explain the foundations of the universe through reference to the workings of Yin and Yang and the Supreme Ultimate.6 On the other hand, Habian also expresses approval for the core ethical teachings of Confucianism. He points out that the Confucians did not argue as the Buddhists did that ‘there was no difference between good and evil’.7 Habian

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thereby differentiates Confucianism favourably from both Buddhism and Shinto because he sees it as a base for moral teaching. There is an aspect of teachings like Confucianism, which we call the teachings of natura, that seeks to protect the five virtues of benevolence, justice, custom, knowledge and faith, with which the nature of the human heart/mind is innately endowed at birth. From a Christian perspective, this aspect of Confucianism should be praised.8 Here Habian equates the scholastic principle of natura with the Confucian (Mencian) concept of xing (Jp. sei) 性, the innate nature of something, which in the human case is presented as an idea of innate moral goodness. In this manner, even during his critique of Confucianism in the second chapter of Myōtei Mondō, Habian also manages to point out good aspects of Confucianism. According to Habian, these aspects of Confucianism set it apart from other non-Christian traditions and show similarities to what Habian identifies as ‘Christian teachings’ (although the discussion of natura is obviously actually derived from scholasticism rather than Christianity). In addition to these comments, made in the chapter critiquing Confucianism, Confucian terms also appear in the last chapter of Myōtei Mondō where Habian outlines his vision of ‘Christian teachings’. As touched on earlier, Habian describes in clearly Confucian terms the function of human beings that delineates their anima rationalis and thereby gives them the potential for an afterlife. The function I speak of here is that which knows the principle of things, and which devotes the heart/mind to the principles of benevolence, justice, custom, knowledge and faith.9 Phrases like ‘knowing the principle’ and ‘having the wisdom to debate good and evil’ could perhaps be explained as referring obliquely to the Jesuit practice of discernment (Lat. discerno, Jp. funbetsu 分別) rather than to Confucian ideas of grasping principle. The problem with this thesis, however, is that the discernment is presented very particularly in other Japanese Christian texts in a manner which is quite at odds with Habian’s approach. In Dochirina Kirishitan for instance, discernment is equated directly with fides.10 Habian’s idea of discerning principle, however, seems to include more cognitive activity than the kind of blind faith advocated in the other texts. Of course, Ignatius’s practice of discernment outlined in his Spiritual Exercises involves harnessing the holy spirit (through faith) to discern between good and evil spirits.11 The interpretation of the relative roles of faith and thought in that process is open and debatable. But it is clear from a comparison of Myōtei Mondō and Dochirina Kirishitan that in the former we see a shift away from a blind-faith idea to a more cognitive process of discerning truth, expressed using Confucian terminology.

Japanese Confucianism and Japanese Christianity 37

Japanese Confucianism and Christianity: two discourses, one conflict Interestingly, a similar emphasis on discerning the principle of things and valuing innate moral goodness can be found in the writings of Japanese Confucian contemporaries of Habian, many of whom congregated in Kyoto, the city in which Habian produced Myōtei Mondō. These trends can also be seen in Tentō (Ch. Tiandao) 天道 thought, a syncretist tradition that slightly preceded the burgeoning of independent (from the Buddhist monasteries) Confucian thought in Kyoto. So-called Tentō thought emerged in Japan towards the end of the Warring States period at the close of the sixteenth century as the label for a range of populist, spiritually inclined movements and texts. Tentō thought became popular during a time not only of large population displacement and disorder caused by the state of total war across central Japan, but also as organized Buddhist religions came under attack and began to divide and splinter. Shingaku gorinsho 心学五倫書 is one name given to a number of seemingly related syncretic, spiritualist Tentō texts that became popular during this period. Interestingly, late twentieth-century scholarship on these texts has at different times ascribed them to Habian, or to the Confucian scholars Fujiwara Seika 藤 原惺窩 (1561–1619) or Kumazawa Banzan 熊沢蕃山 (1619–91).12 Today it is generally acknowledged that this text pre-dates Banzan and therefore could not possibly have been written by him.13 The theories attributing it to Seika or Habian have also lost popularity. Nonetheless, this mistake itself demonstrates the extent to which there was overlap in intellectual trends of this time, in particular between Habian, a Christian, and Seika and Banzan, who were Confucians. As the early years of the seventeenth century progressed, the production, influence and reach of Japanese Confucian thinking expanded rapidly. The two names most commonly associated with these trends are Fujiwara Seika and his pupil Hayashi Razan 林羅山 (1583–1657): they have traditionally been described as the founders of a tradition or ‘school’ of Confucianism, a trend which later came to be known (somewhat incorrectly in the case of Seika) as ‘Japanese Zhu Xi-ism’ (often translated in English, again somewhat violently, as ‘Japanese NeoConfucianism’).14 Fujiwara Seika, who was very close in age to Habian, and like him had been orphaned at a young age by war, is often historicized as ‘the first Japanese NeoConfucian’. Compared with Hayashi Razan, however, Seika was much less fundamentally Zhu Xi-oriented: he had a much more open, tolerant intellectual inclination, with surprising points of similarity to the Jesuit-period Habian. Indeed, one of the most overlooked aspects of the history of Confucianism in early Tokugawa Japan is that these two so-called ‘founding fathers of Japanese Neo-Confucianism’ disagreed on many central issues. Fascinatingly, these disagreements seem to parallel the differences between Habian’s Myōtei Mondō and conservative European Jesuit texts such as Dochirina Kirishitan. Both conflicts seem to have been motivated by the fact that Seika’s and Habian’s ideas were less appropriate for integration into systems of social

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control or constructions of institution-based intellectual orthodoxy. Both Seika and Habian located their ideas of universal truth immanently – Seika through emphasis on the heart/mind, Habian through emphasis on anima rationalis, both of which were located not in an externalized order, but instead within the spirit/ heart of the individual. Both writers were criticized for these points by figures claiming to represent the ‘orthodox’ position in their traditions – Razan in the case of Confucianism, the European clergy in the case of Christianity. Early Tokugawa thought is often seen as a move away from the spiritualism of the Warring States period to a more ‘rational’ inclination of thought. The focus on the individual human interior in both Seika and Habian, however, like the inclination of Shingaku gorinsho, seems representative not so much of a rupture with the past (moving towards a process of ‘rationalization’), but rather of a continuity with the preceding spiritual thought traditions.15 This can be seen by examining certain core aspects of Seika’s ideas. His thought is classically described as being ‘not pure Zhu Xi Confucianism’. Concretely, it is alleged that Seika’s Confucianism is too practically oriented to be ‘pure Zhu Xi Confucianism’.16 In other words, it is commonly held that Seika seemed more interested in ideas relating to actual human conduct rather than to the metaphysical systems of Zhu Xi Confucianism. A good example of this is his explication of ‘the investigation of things’ 格物 (Jp. kakubutsu, Ch. gewu), the practice of internalizing universal truth that centrally related the metaphysics of Zhu Xi philosophy to human practice. Seika followed the Ming Confucian Lin Zhaoen 林兆恩 in steering away from the orthodox Zhu Xi definition of practice as a meditative internalization of an external truth. Instead he emphasized a practice in which individuals used their innate intellect to process objects.17 In one of Fujiwawa Seika’s major works, Daigaku yōryaku 大学要略, his notes on the primary text of post-Song period Confucianism, The Great Learning 大学 (Ch. Daxue, Jp. Daigaku), Seika quotes Lin at length, particularly following him in relating the process of ‘the investigation of things’ to the immanence in human beings of the five Confucian virtues. The virtues of the five relations are not something absorbed from outside, they are innate in our nature, endowed by Heaven.18 Seika emphasized his view of the importance of individual human agency in Confucian practice even further when he discussed the meaning of one of the key terms in The Great Learning, zhengyi 真意 (Jp. i wo makoto ni su), often translated as ‘making thoughts sincere’ or ‘making one’s intentions sincere’. This term appears as an important element in the most famous phrase of all Confucian texts, the passage in the The Great Learning attributed to Confucius that states: The ancients, who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they

Japanese Confucianism and Japanese Christianity 39 first rectified their hearts/minds. Wishing to rectify their hearts/minds, they first made their thoughts/intentions sincere. Wishing to make their thoughts/ intentions sincere, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.19 Seika began his discussion about ‘sincerity of thoughts’/‘sincerity of intentions’ by following the orthodox Zhu Xi commentary on The Great Learning in stating that: ‘Making one’s thoughts/intentions sincere means never deceiving oneself.’20 But he then diverged from the standard Zhu Xi interpretation, arguing: In order to make one’s thoughts/intentions sincere, one must never deceive oneself. Deceiving means to delude oneself. We should concentrate here on this word ‘oneself’. It goes without saying that people get deceived, but when we ourselves know the right path and do not enact it, does this not mean that we ourselves are deceiving our own heart? Therefore, to make one’s intention sincere means that we ourselves should not cheat our own intentions/thoughts.21 As Seika himself points out, the most important part of his commentary is the emphasis on self. Seika’s emphasis is not on the role of externalized gods, spirits, or kings, but on oneself knowing and following the right path. In this manner, Seika emphasized aspects of Confucian practice which offer an emphasis on human agency through spiritual practice. Concretely, Seika’s interpretation of ‘investigating things’, under the influence of Ming School of Mind tendencies, follows Lin in rejecting elements of Zhu Xi-ism to instead emphasize the role of the human mind/heart in a spiritual process of ‘investigating things’.22 It is notable that Seika, the most well-known Confucian active in Kyoto when Habian lived there, took an approach to Confucianism that underplayed Zhu Xi-ist metaphysics (the main object of Habian’s criticism of Confucianism) and emphasized practical aspects of Confucian teachings related to human agency in virtuous conduct. This shows perhaps a certain overlap of priorities and interests between contemporaneous intellectuals from different (Christian and Confucian) traditions.

Early Japanese Confucianism: individual versus institution It is also notable that the major point of intellectual difference between Seika and Hayashi Razan, his sometime student who later became recognized as the centre of a new Confucian orthodoxy in Japan, lay exactly in this interpretation of Confucian practice.23 Razan deliberately and overtly delineated his ideas from Seika’s by rejecting sections of Seika’s writings that appeared to show Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1528) influence.24 Razan made this perfectly clear in his own criticisms of Seika.25 These criticisms, ostensibly communicated in letters, were published by Razan’s sons in Hayashi Razan Bunshū as ‘Questions and Answers with Seika’ (Seika tōmon 惺窩答問)26 – presenting a delineation between Seika

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and Razan that formed part of the attempt to portray Razan’s thought as the ‘Zhu Xi-ist orthodoxy’ of Confucianism in Japan.27 Razan’s criticisms of Seika were based on his belief that Seika had, by accepting Yang-ming teaching that ‘there is no Principle other than the heart/mind’ 心外 無理, thereby accepted the arguments of a contemporary competitor of Zhu Xi, Lu Xiangshan 陸象山 (Jp. Riku Shōsan) (1139–93), who argued that ‘Principle equals the mind/heart’ 理即心, a view that Zhu Xi and Razan identified as ‘Zen Buddhist’ (and hence bad). This criticism is thought to have been communicated by Razan to Seika through letters addressed to the intermediary Yoshida Soan 吉 田素庵 (1571–1632).28 Seika responded to criticism of his use of Xiangshan and Yang-ming as follows: With their thousands of words and myriads of utterances, the sages and worthies wanted people to recognize Principle. How they express it is not the same, but what they enter into is [the same]. Moreover, all the men of former times had their own method of entry [to the problem]. Zhou Dunyi 周子 had his ‘giving primacy to quiescence’ 主静; the Chengs 程子 had their ‘holding to reverent seriousness’ 持敬; Zhu Xi 朱子 his ‘fathoming of Principle’ 窮理; Lu Xiangshan 象山 his ‘easy simplicity’ 易簡; Chen Bosha’s 白沙 ‘tranquility and completeness’ 静円, and Wang Yang-ming his ‘innate knowledge’ 良知. The words they use are different, but they are all talking about the same thing.29 Here Seika illustrates how Chinese commentators on the Confucian tradition from different historical periods have put various interpretations on the meaning of one of the key terms in Song and Ming Confucianism – ‘investigate things’. Seika’s argument is that they all refer to the same principle. Seika thereby rejected the idea common in Ming-period Confucian writing, and wholeheartedly adopted by Razan, that there was a dichotomy in Song and Ming Confucianism between ‘School of Principle’ (Zhu Xi-ist) and ‘School of Mind’ (Yang-ming-ist) tendencies, which needed to be resolved by taking one side or the other. That said, it is clear that Seika’s interpretation, especially under the influence of Lin, did emphasize the role of the mind/heart. Razan was already critical of this position fairly early in his career, while Seika was still alive;30 but his approach to the issue of ‘the investigation of things’ developed further after Seika’s death in 1619. In Razan’s later writings the concept of heart/mind had become very different to Seika’s active image. Razan developed ‘the investigation of things’ into a concept where human agency was obliterated. For example, in Razan’s introduction to Zhu Xi’s commentary on the Four Books, human beings are presented as like other animals, vegetables and inanimate objects – subject to a deterministic paradigm. Then Heaven created the multifarious things and to each of them gave a Principle. People, things, they all attained a Principle. The virtue of Yin and Yang and the five relations was innate in their heart/minds and this was called

Japanese Confucianism and Japanese Christianity 41 Nature. … When people or things each automatically follow their Nature, then it is inevitable that the Way of Principle will function in the relations between all things.31 Razan sees people, like ‘things’, as displaying the virtues of the five relations by ‘automatically following their [predetermined] natures’. In this system there is no place for the autonomous function of the heart/mind. It is seen to function only in line with a predetermined ‘Nature’. As Ishida Ichirō has pointed out, this theoretical construct became the basis for the later ‘Japanese Zhu Xi-ist’ intellectual tendency to describe ‘Heaven (The Supreme Ultimate) as controlling, and people as responding’.32 This was the pattern by which conflicts inherent in Song-Ming Confucianism engaged each other in the early construction of socalled ‘Tokugawa Confucianism’.

Confucians and Christians: fighting the same battles There is a clear parallel between this conflict, occurring between Confucians in early seventeenth-century Japan, and the conflict within the scholastic tradition that was unfolding within Jesuit groups in China and Japan at the same time. Both conflicts centred on whether the idea of truth should be located internally or externally. This was related to conflicts over the role of human agency in the tradition, and the role of knowledge in verifying truth. Habian in the scholastic tradition, and Seika in the Confucian tradition, saw the principle supporting correct ethical action (benevolence, justice, custom, knowledge, faith) as residing innately in human beings as heart/mind (Seika) or anima rationalis (Habian). Both of them saw ‘knowledge’ (which Seika identified with the ‘investigation of things’, and Habian identified with ‘discernment’) as playing a central role in realizing innate principle or truth. On the other hand, both the mainstream European Jesuits in Japan, and the Confucian orthodoxy Razan was attempting to build, emphasized the role of an externalized predetermined construct of truth immanent in externalized social hierarchies – the hierarchy of the new feudal order in the case of Razan, the feudal hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in the case of the conservative European Jesuits. This latter position would go on to be associated both with mainstream ‘Japanese Christian thought’ and with ‘Japanese Zhu Xi-ist orthodoxy’. In contrast to these ‘Japanese Christian’ and ‘Japanese Zhu Xi-ist’ orthodoxies, Habian’s and Seika’s ideas located spirituality in the person and thereby potentially supported human autonomous action. In fact, if we look not only at Seika’s writings, but indeed at much intellectual writing in Japan at the very end of the 1500s and in the first decade of the 1600s, we notice that the social conditions of Japan at this time (in the period immediately preceding, and at the very beginning of, the Tokugawa shogunate) appeared to support intellectual approaches that placed emphasis on autonomous human (often spiritual) practice. From this same social background, a range of intellectual trends emerged that seemed to possess similarities with Habian’s approach. These

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included not only Seika, but School of Mind-influenced Confucian trends and other syncretic trends mentioned above which displayed spiritualist tendencies, and which enjoyed a brief period of popularity at this time.33 The destabilized Japanese political environment of the sixteenth century created conditions of religious, political and social splintering and displacement. As the early seventeenth century progressed, however, a new more stabilized political situation emerged. In this context, the syncretic traditions of the sixteenth century began to fade, and structures of orthodoxy and heterodoxy capable of ordering intellectual traditions in an authoritarian framework began to emerge. In other words, instead of an intellectual milieu where isolated practitioners developed their own ideas as they liked, more systematized intellectual trends – capable of integration with systems of social control – began to be more highly valued. To put it another way, the social conditions that had allowed the kind of syncretic multiplicity seen at the end of the Warring States period (the political and thereby also inevitably ideological vacuum) was gradually replaced by more stable, hierarchically ordered conditions that supported the utilization and standardization of intellectual and religious traditions. The vast bulk of antiChristian discourse emerged after the establishment of these conditions (from the 1630s onwards).34 In the emerging tradition of Neo-Confucianism in Japan, the products of the former and latter of these two sets of conditions are represented by Fujiwara Seika and Hayashi Razan, respectively. Although Seika – associated with texts such as Shingaku gorinsho, and a clearly pluralist approach to the Confucian tradition – represented the more open intellectual context of the earlier period, Razan beyond doubt became a representative of the creation of intellectual orthodoxy associated with the establishment of a central order, and eventually a stable state (the Tokugawa shogunate) in the later period. In the case of the Christian tradition, we have the fascinating possibility of identifying these two competing trends or periods in the writings of one person. In the 1621 work Hadaiusu 破提宇子, the post-apostate Habian, in the midst of the violent suppression of Christians in Nagasaki and the absolute consolidation of Tokugawa power, wrote what has come to be seen as his own attack on the thought of Myōtei Mondō and the trends it represented. Habian’s case is interesting, in that he lived through and seems to have functioned in both milieus. Consequently he is seen in the almost dual-personality framework described as his ‘tenkō’ – what is usually referred to in English as his ‘apostasy’ from Christianity, but which we could perhaps instead describe as his adaptation to the new intellectual–political nexus.35

Hadaiusu: apostasy or adaptation? Most anti-Christian discourse in Tokugawa Japan, as will be discussed in the next chapter, did not address arguments of Christian theology or otherwise significantly connect with Japanese Christian thought. Hadaiusu, however, authored as it was by Habian, was obviously and intimately connected to the Japanese Christian

Japanese Confucianism and Japanese Christianity 43 tradition. There is no doubt that some parts of Hadaiusu, though not all, were aimed directly at Myōtei Mondō. If, however, as argued above, Myōtei Mondō was not representative of orthodox Christian thought, then what did a rejection of that text actually mean? Was Hadaiusu simply a rejection of Christianity written after the banning of the religion, or is there more significance in this text, perhaps related to the more general concurrent trends of change in Japanese thought? Habian is thought to have left the Jesuits around 1608. Hadaiusu, authored in 1620, is seen as representing his total apostasy or tenkō, his ‘turning’ or change of allegiance. But from what, and to what, did Habian’s allegiance change? As we have seen, the position from which Habian made his change was not a simple ‘Christian’ (in the Catholic doctrinal sense) one: it included syncretic trends influenced by Confucianism, and a particular approach to conflicts within the scholastic tradition. His position, clearly explained and enunciated, exhibited a strong overall humanist tendency. In this sense, although Myōtei Mondō presented much criticism of non-Christian intellectual traditions, it also offered up a clearly enunciated positive alternative, represented by Habian’s humanist scholastic paradigm. It is this paradigm with which we must compare Hadaiusu if we are to examine the text to understand Habian’s tenkō in the context of the larger intellectual changes occurring in Japan at this time. As for the position to which Habian changed, or turned, in his tenkō, until now there has been little discussion of what Hadaiusu offers up as an alternative to Christianity. This question is vital to understanding not only early anti-Christian thought, but also what we might describe as the development (or some might call the regression) of Christian thought itself (or some Christian thinkers themselves) in the early seventeenth century. Recent research often seems to avoid issues that suggest elements of continuity between Christian and anti-Christian thought. It is only if we look back to preWWII fascist-period Japanese research, some written with a barely disguised antiChristian slant, that we can see discussion of the continuity between the Christian and post-Christian Habian. An interesting example is Shinmura Izuru’s 新村出 1922 work Nanban Kōki 南蛮広記 which even questioned whether the Habian of Hadaiusu had actually given up Christianity. Even after his return to the true path [after his renunciation of Christianity], Habian still used his Christian name [Habian being derived from Fabian]. Considering this, we cannot but doubt whether his intentions in rejecting Christianity were sincere.36 A few years later, referring to this passage from Shinmura, the great religious studies scholar Anesaki Masaharu 姉崎正治 (1873–1949), in his first book of a series dealing with Japanese Christian thought, took a more detailed look at the question of Habian’s ‘apostasy’. Anesaki, using source research that alluded to tensions within the Japanese Jesuit order between Habian and European priests,

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became the first to suggest that Habian’s ‘change’ may have been a bit more complex than a simple path from ‘Christianity’ to ‘apostasy’.37 Referring to tensions within the Jesuits in Japan, and suggesting Hadaiusu as a reaction against those tensions, Anesaki argued that ‘it is not really possible to explain Habian’s actions in terms of a true problem of faith, where he “suddenly awakened” and gave up Christianity; rather, I would like to explain his actions as having been motivated by actual concrete events’.38 References to internal Jesuit political conflicts instead of matters of faith as the possible motivation for Habian’s resignation from the Jesuits can be found not only in Anesaki, but also in George Elison’s work.39 Both scholars, however, concluded there was not enough documentary evidence to arrive at a solid determination of Habian’s motivations. From this conclusion, however, rather than keeping the issue of Habian’s departure from the Jesuits open, both scholars went on to discuss Habian’s change in allegiance as if it were an ‘apostasy’, despite having cast doubt on whether this was actually the case. Both Anesaki and Elison allude to the fact that Habian’s ‘change’ may have been affected not by a change in his own beliefs or faith, but rather by changes in the political situation around him. Nevertheless, both still ultimately analysed Hadaiusu and Habian’s ‘apostasy’ in terms of a ‘Christian’ versus ‘anti-Christian’ paradigm. Although at times acknowledging that Habian’s ‘change’ was probably not a simple ‘apostasy’ from Christianity, they both use the word ‘apostasy’ (in Japanese, Anesaki uses the word kikyō 棄教) as the main way to describe Habian’s change. Moreover, Elison, by powerfully (although, as I will argue below, incorrectly) presenting Hadaiusu as a complete rejection of Myōtei Mondō in all respects, reinforced a simplified ‘Christian’ versus ‘anti-Christian’ paradigm for his analysis of the change in Habian’s approach.40 Although suggesting a range of different paradigms within which the shift in Habian occurred, this research in the end presented the shift as one ‘from Christianity to anti-Christianity’. Interestingly, neither scholar attempted to analyse Hadaiusu itself, the only reliable extant source we have of the post-Jesuit Habian, in terms of these issues. I would suggest that the very nature of words like ‘apostasy’, or the Japanese tenkō, posit an ‘either/or’ paradigm that potentially limits the scope of analysis. This paradigm assumes that there are only two competing views between which the subject is choosing, the parameters of which are predetermined and not related to the specific context of the subject. Of course, in certain periods of history, especially during processes of increasing authoritarianism, it is a fact that people are pushed into binary choices. In Japanese history the word tenkō is often used to refer to the processes by which leftists were made to renounce socialism or communism in favour of fascist ultra-nationalism during the twentieth century. In this modern case, as in the case of the suppression of Christians in the seventeenth century, many of the people who ‘tenkōed’ and paid lip-service to the new orthodoxy must have done so only to avoid death, torture and other unpleasantries. So although ideas of ‘apostasy’ and tenkō have a certain social validity, there is no doubt that the use of such categories can lead us to push individual thinkers into overly limited categories that may not represent their true (pre-coercion)

Japanese Confucianism and Japanese Christianity 45 intentions. This approach can thereby limit our ability to discern much of what was occurring in their thought. Hadaiusu has until now been examined in terms of a framework that assumes the ‘Christian’/‘anti-Christian’ conflict as the dominant paradigm and sees the text as representative of the hinge upon which sits Habian’s ‘turn’ (tenkō). But perhaps it might be valuable to consider the text without the presupposition of a tenkō defined in binary terms. After all, there are a range of other contexts to this text, ranging from the political conflicts within the Japanese Jesuit order (alluded to by Anesaki and Elison) to the broader and more heterogeneous contexts of Japanese thought at this time, which lie completely outside the realm of ‘Christian thought’. One aspect of that broader context is the conflict (referred to above) concerning the question of externally or internally located conceptions of truth in Confucianism. Another related aspect is Japan’s contemporaneous move towards the construction of orthodoxy in Confucian thought. Looking at Hadaiusu in these broader contexts offers the capacity to move beyond binary categories and see how discourses surrounding what has become known as ‘Christian thought’ functioned in the broader environment of Japanese political, ethical and religious thought.

Hadaiusu explored: elements of continuity Hadaiusu is made up of seven sections or ‘steps’, each of which focuses critically on one aspect of Christian doctrine. These seven steps take up the first 85 per cent or so of the text. The remainder consists of a section entitled tōwa 答話, a question-and-answer session where Habian uses reminiscences of his own life inside the Jesuit order to criticize the morality of the Christians.41 The topics of Christian doctrine discussed, and therefore the objects of criticism of each of the seven steps, can be summarized as follows. The first step deals with the theory of the creation of all things by a sentient and virtuous creator-god Deus. The second step deals with anima theory and the idea that the human capacity for an afterlife is given to human beings by God through anima rationalis. The third step deals with the appearance of Satan. The fourth step deals with the story of Adam and Eve and the roots of original sin. The fifth step deals with God’s reaction to the original sin. The sixth step deals with the appearance on earth of Jesus Christ as the second person of the trinity and his absolution of original sin through the crucifixion. The seventh step deals with the ten commandments. The most striking thing about the criticisms of Christianity in Hadaiusu is that only two of these points, the first and second, are emphasized in the Jesuit Habian’s promotion of Christianity in Myōtei Mondō. The bulk of the criticism – steps three to six dealing with the devil, original sin, and Christ’s role in forgiving sin through crucifixion – was, as discussed in the previous chapter, touched upon only briefly in Myōtei Mondō. Like discussion of the ten commandments, these arguments were glossed over in Myōtei Mondō and did not play a central role in Habian’s promotion of Christianity. Although these arguments were central to texts like Dochirina Kirishitan, they were peripheral at best and often completely

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marginalized or excluded from the argument of Myōtei Mondō. In Hadaiusu, Habian himself points out the difference between the arguments dealt with in the first two points and those of points three to seven. The first two steps do contain some mature, intellectual content; but when we listen to the arguments of step three onwards, we see that there is no depth and that the arguments just get more and more ridiculous.42 There is a continuity here in the logic underlying both Myōtei Mondō and Hadaiusu. In both texts Habian takes seriously theories relating to creation, and to the anima theories of scholastic philosophy. In both texts Habian does not seem to take seriously teachings related to original sin and the devil. In other words, although in Myōtei Mondō Habian did not openly criticize doctrinal teachings relating to original sin, he nevertheless basically ignored them. This demonstrates a certain consistency in the approach of Habian in both texts: he seems to regard these elements of Christian doctrine as particularly weak. It also shows that Hadaiusu was not a simple negation of Myōtei Mondō – most of Hadaiusu’s content was in fact unrelated to Myōtei Mondō. This also potentially undermines a representation of Habian as having completely ‘turned over’ or ‘changed’ in the period between the two texts. To either salvage or sink such a representation, we must examine how Hadaiusu addressed points one and two relating to the existence of a creator God and the anima theory, which were emphasized in Myōtei Mondō. The interesting thing about Hadaiusu’s treatment of the existence of a creator God is that, rather than rejecting this idea outright, Hadaiusu attacks Christianity on this point for its ‘unoriginality’. Habian opens his criticism of the Christian idea of a creator God as follows: I rebut by saying: Is there anything remarkable about this? Are there any schools [of thought/religion] which do not discuss this?43 Habian then goes on to quote from Laozi, Confucius and Buddhist texts to demonstrate that the idea of creation is completely unoriginal. Although Hadaiusu thus does not criticize the theory of creation itself, what it does criticize is the idea of God as a sentient being. This is a major point of difference with Myōtei Mondō. [in rebuttal]: [The Christians say that] because God possesses knowledge and discernment he is something more than Natural Law. I have to laugh at this suggestion. You are unable to understand the principle of the ‘illumination of the still mind’ (kyorei fumai 虚霊不昧). The Christians again say: If at the origin there is no wisdom and virtue, then whence came the intellect and wisdom of human beings and the order present in the movements of the myriad things? When we look at these principles we see that the originator must have possessed wisdom and virtue.

Japanese Confucianism and Japanese Christianity 47 I rebut by saying: A willow is green, a flower is red, this is just the natural order. Break open the roots of a willow and look at them, they are not green. Smash the stem of a flower and look at it. It is not red. This is the manifest base of the flow of Nature.44 Exactly the same argument is used in Myōtei Mondō, where the key Zhu Xiist Confucian idea of the ‘illumination of the still mind’ is equated with anima rationalis.45 The classic Buddhist analogy relating to the greenness of the willow and redness of the flower is also used in Myōtei Mondō in the same section. In Myōtei Mondō, Myōshū uses this same analogy to explain Zhu Xi-ist Confucian ‘state-principle theory’ 事理説 (Jp. jirisetu, Ch. shilishuo). Of course, while in Myōtei Mondō this explanation of the Confucian theory is refuted by Yūtei (the representative of ‘Christian learning’), in Hadaiusu it stands as a positive statement. This is related to Habian’s refutation of his own anima theory in the second section of Hadaiusu. Here he criticizes anima theory again from a Song Confucian perspective. I am going to tell you the truth, so listen. All of the multifarious things possess the two elements of ‘state’ 事 [Jp. ji, Ch. Shi] and ‘Principle’ [Jp. ri, Ch. Li]. In other words, nothing can exist without Principle, and it is this Principle which is [universally] endowed from Heaven. … It is because the substance 気質 of individual things is not all the same that the function of different things is also not the same. So why should we divide up different Principle into categories like vegetabilis, sensibilis and rationalis? They think that the various schools of thought do not know of the idea that the mind of human beings, they call it anima rationalis, is different to other things and therefore is the fundamental principle that controls bodily desires.46 Here Habian uses the key Neo-Confucian paradigm of state and Principle, which is related to function and form. According to this paradigm the form of all things is the Principle (li), their manifested state is their state (shi). The latter determines their function. This is related to the underlying Neo-Confucian dichotomy between substance/essence 気 (Ch. qi, Jp. ki) and Principle: there is just one universal form called Principle, and the differences between things, for instance differences in the natures or characteristics of people, are determined by differences in their substance/essence. Habian follows the classic Neo-Confucian criticism of scholastic philosophy that by equating anima with form, the scholastics/Christians bifurcate the idea of a universal Principle. Interestingly, in this passage, while Habian mentions this point saying, ‘why should we divide up Principle’, he also in the end states that, basically, the location in the mind of the capacity to control bodily desires is not so different to other (non-Christian) teachings. The point is made quite clearly, however, that the Principle is universal and that differing essence determines differing function. This matches the analysis of contemporary orthodox Japanese Zhu Xi-ist Confucians (such as Hayashi Razan or Yamazaki Ansai 山崎闇斎

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(1618–82)) in locating divergence from Principle in the essence of people. Habian further develops this argument along orthodox Zhu Xi-ist Confucian lines. The Confucians call the physical desires of essence/matter ‘the mind of human beings’, and call what they think of as righteous Principle ‘the mind of the Way’. In relation to this point [the second step of Hadaiusu arguing against anima theory] the Confucian schools’ penetration of Good is not matched by Christianity, the twisted teachings of the barbarians. ‘The mind of human beings is nothing but danger, the mind of the Way is nothing but [beautiful] subtlety.’ This is the truth of the matter.47 This analysis in turn potentially supports arguments critical of a location of truth in the individual human subject. It does this by seemingly locating truth as Principle outside of the human subject. The political significance of this tendency in Hadaiusu is spelt out towards the end of the text’s second step. After ascending to the throne, Yu of Xia saw a criminal. Stepping down from his chariot he cried, ‘The people of King Yao and King Shun based their intentions [mind/heart] on the mind/heart of Yao and Shun. As Emperor I now rule as King, [yet] the people make their intentions [mind/heart] based on mind/heart of themselves. This pains the Emperor [me] as I myself take responsibility for this’.48 Yao, Shun and Yu are the mythical sage kings of ancient China. In the Confucian tradition they are the ultimate representatives of human sages. Their ‘Way’ is held up as all but perfect governance, and the conduct of their states similarly held to be the Confucian ideal. In this quote from the shibashilue 十八史略, a king laments that he has failed as a ruler. His failure is represented by a criminal (the existence of crime) in his kingdom. He laments that this criminal act is due to his failing to get the people to follow him, and he compares himself unfavourably with the ancient sage kings’ ability to get the people to ‘model their intentions’ on the king’s. In other words, the ‘norms’ that the people should follow are not abstracted or personally immanent truths, but are rather personified in the external social order of the rulers. In Myōtei Mondō, by contrast, anima rationalis is presented as an inherently human characteristic located in the individual human soul, giving the capacity for correct action through individual spiritual discernment, a process with links to what in modern society we might describe as the exercise of individual moral judgement. In this passage from Hadaiusu, however, the idea of the ‘people’ taking their intentions from the ‘mind/heart of themselves’ is seen as the root of disorder. Conversely, the correct way is for the ‘people of Yao and Shun to base their intentions (mind/heart) on the mind/heart of Yao and Shun’. In other words a process by which the people identify not with an individually immanent rationale, but instead with the rationale of an externalized political order or hegemony, is presented as ideal. This paradigm of locating thought and action in an externalized

Japanese Confucianism and Japanese Christianity 49 order is argued in Hadaiusu not only in relation to the feudal monarch-based political system, but also in relation to a broader set of human relations. The best example of this is presented in step seven, where Hadaiusu criticizes the first of the ten commandments. The first commandment states that if something goes against the will of God, then you should even disobey your king or father or value lightly your own life [instead of complying]. In this precept lurks a mind to betray and usurp the nation, and to wipe out the laws of Buddha and king. What argument can there be against quickly putting these followers [of Christianity] in irons? ‘In all cases, the precepts for attaining good can be found in the morals preserved in the people’s daily lives’. There are many elements in human ethics, but none exceed the five relations: king and vassal; parent and child; husband and wife; elder brother and younger brother; friend and friend. If the duties inherent in these relations are carried out completely, what more can be added? Someone who would disturb/confuse these relations would inevitably commit the gravest atrocities and immoralities. The duties of king and vassal are loyalty and reward; the duties of parent and child are filial piety and care; the duties of husband and wife are the ritual proprieties of distinctiveness and separation; the duty of brothers towards each other is brotherly love; the duty of friends towards each other is trust. And bestowing the nature of the five relations on humanity is the duty of the will of Heaven.49 Here Hadaiusu makes it clear that it defines ‘the will of Heaven’ and ‘nature’ not as principles to be discerned within the rationale of the human mind/heart, nor even through an abstracted conception of God or Nature, but rather as something immanent in the sociopolitical order.50 This is a clear case where an argument of Myōtei Mondō is rebutted by Hadaiusu, and rebutted clearly within an ideological paradigm which emphasizes the location of authority in the extant sociopolitical order. Taking this into account, it seems that the difference in the Jesuit and postJesuit thought of Habian, the nature of his ‘tenkō’, can be identified as occurring along similar lines to the ideological differences identified in contemporaneous Confucian thought between Seika and Razan. The shift seen between Myōtei Mondō and Hadaiusu, rather than being a simple shift from a ‘Christian’ to an ‘anti-Christian’ (or, more primitively still, a ‘Western’ to an ‘Eastern’) outlook, is perhaps indicative of a more general trend in Japanese society at this time where intellectual writing of different traditions was becoming increasingly integrated into a systematized framework supportive of political control. The Habian of Myōtei Mondō argued that the capacity for the Good, represented by the virtues of benevolence, justice, custom, knowledge and faith, existed immanently in each and every human being as anima rationalis. Therefore, Good action in human society (potentially including political action) was to be realized through autonomously enacting something (anima rationalis) immanent in the individual human. Conversely, the Habian of Hadaiusu, in a manner very

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similar to that of the famous Buddhist ideologue Suzuki Shōsan 鈴木正三 (1579– 1655) 40 years later, argued that Good action consisted of action in line with externally determined ‘duties’ identified in terms of set hierarchical social and political relations: ‘the orders of the state’, the ‘duty’ inherent in the relations of king and vassal, and father and son.51 This clearly subjugated issues relating to the judgement of correct or incorrect action to standards determined by the hierarchical social relations of the prevailing sociopolitical order.

Conclusion: Habian’s tenkō and the role of autonomy in politics and society The difference between Myōtei Mondō and Hadaiusu, put simply, is that Myōtei Mondō was difficult to employ in a discourse of control. It located the centre for ethical judgement in the autonomous thought of the individual human being. This was the inherent problem with Myōtei Mondō, not only from authoritarian political perspectives such as that of the shogunate, but also from authoritarian religious perspectives, such as those of the orthodox Jesuit European hierarchy in Japan. On the other hand, the approach of Hadaiusu was amenable to a discourse of authoritarian control because it located ethical judgement in solidly determined, externalized hierarchical sociopolitical relations. By privileging thought based on existent social relations, instead of on individual autonomy, the latter position was inherently conservative. Thus even in the case of Hadaiusu – of all Japanese anti-Christian texts the one most integrated with actual Christian thought – the major point of criticism seems to relate less to differences between ‘Christian’ and ‘non-Christian’ traditions, than to paradigms describing the role of autonomous thought in political society. This is of course not to say that the text Hadaiusu has no role to play in also elucidating aspects of the history of Christianity in Japan. Of course, Hadaiusu does provide a systematic critique of contemporaneous Catholic doctrine (even if not the doctrine favoured by the Jesuit Habian, or indeed for that matter by figures like Ricci). It was also obviously designed and planned as an anti-Christian text at a time when Christianity had not yet been totally suppressed. Nevertheless, Hadaiusu also demonstrates that even in the earliest cases of anti-Christian texts with provisionally ‘doctrinal’ arguments, these texts are operating in interaction with discourses that transcend the simple ‘Christian versus anti-Christian’ paradigm. Rather, the contrast or development in Habian between Myōtei Mondō and Hadaiusu in many ways resembles the contrast or development in the two different forms of Neo-Confucianism advanced by Seika and Razan. Regardless of the tradition, the move is towards intellectual paradigms that locate truth in externalized social hierarchies rather than in the processes of individual internalized thought or discernment. In short, they are processes that validate power. This chapter has demonstrated – through confirming in-depth references in Christian texts to Confucian thought, and overlaps in the content of both traditions in Tentō texts – that there was some intellectual overlap, confluence and interplay

Japanese Confucianism and Japanese Christianity 51 between the Christian and Confucian traditions. Looking at the extant texts from the period, the extent of this overlap is clear from the fact that in some cases it is not even possible to differentiate between the traditions. This fact makes the considerable similarities discernible in the underlying conflicts within each tradition even more fascinating. It does appear that differences in Neo-Confucian thought between Seika and Razan – seemingly under the influence of changes to the sociopolitical context which that thought engaged with – mirror differences between the pre- and post-apostate Habian. The intellectual context of the early seventeenth century, when the first massive wave of anti-Christian discourse broke over Japan, therefore, was not simply a clash between ‘rational Eastern thought’ and ‘superstitious Western Christianity’, but a much more nuanced and complex context, in which an array of different approaches to issues of political and ethical thought were colliding and interacting within and between a diverse range of traditions and players.

3

Early Tokugawa antiChristian discourse Proclamations, populist literature and diplomacy

If a clash between autonomy and institutional authority was the immediate intellectual context of the outbreak of anti-Christian discourse in the seventeenth century, what was its immediate political context? And what was the general nature of Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse itself? This chapter gives an overview of the development of the literature from the beginning through to the middle of the seventeenth century, which has traditionally been identified as the main body of anti-Christian discourse – the ‘Japanese anti-Christian canon’, as it were. That overview begins with, and is set in the context of, an examination of the political reality of the actual banning and suppression of Christianity in Japan from around 1612. The popular image of seventeenth-century anti-Christian discourse is that it emerged from the banning of Christianity and functioned primarily in opposition to Christianity. A cursory examination of the relationship between the actual ban on Christianity and the nature of early anti-Christian discourse, however, presents a more complex picture. This chapter begins by revisiting the motivation for and process of the suppression of Christianity in early seventeenth-century Japan, before moving on to examine the range of texts generally regarded as the main sources of antiChristian discourse in this period. This examination will begin with the small number of government-authored institutional texts (primarily anti-Christian proclamations), which were intimately connected with the actual prohibition of the religion, before focusing on the more numerous popular texts of the midseventeenth century. These have less connection with the suppression itself, yet make up the bulk of the ‘anti-Christian canon’ of Japanese writings.1 In the last section of the chapter we will again examine government-authored texts with antiChristian content, but in this case diplomatic correspondence. These diplomatic documents, while being important sources of anti-Christian writing from the same period, have until now generally not been discussed in mainstream writing on Japanese anti-Christian discourse.2 This new look at another, less populist form of anti-Christian writing of this period takes the discussion on the political usages of anti-Christian discourse into fresh territory. Taken altogether, this analysis will show that early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse was not chiefly a philosophical–intellectual attack on the West and Christianity in support of the religion’s domestic suppression; rather, it was in fact

Early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse 53 a discourse aimed at legitimizing and buttressing the existing social order and the authority of the Tokugawa shogunate. This in turn paved the way for anti-Christian discourse’s ultimate use, to be explored in later chapters, as an ideological strut of the modern Japanese nation state.

The political roots of the suppression of Christianity The early seventeenth-century suppression of Christianity and the end of Japan’s so-called ‘Christian century’ has been one of the most popular and dramatically narrated aspects of Japanese history. It has been transformed into an array of almost pop stories of persecution, violence, torture and extermination. It is also an event that has been approached from a range of different historical angles focusing on its religious, cultural or political significance.3 The main period of active and sustained government suppression of Christianity dates from around 1612 until the effective annihilation of Christianity by the end of the 1630s. Some systematic measures ostensibly introduced for the control of Christianity, such as the temple registration system (danka seido 檀家制度) and edicts against the religion, continued to operate through the entire Tokugawa period, well into the nineteenth century. There are also a number of incidents of repression of so-called kakure kirishitan (hidden Christians) through the late seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The main period of actual anti-Christian action, however, had pretty much ended by the 1640s. By this time Christianity had been effectively wiped out.4 The main period of suppression began in March 1612 with measures taken by Tokugawa Ieyasu in cities under direct shogunate control in Kantō and Shizuoka. In August these measures were extended to the Kansai region. The suppression’s geographical extension was matched by a social one: its initial target was only samurai directly employed by the shogunate, which broadened first to other samurai in areas administered directly by the shogunate, then to non-samurai classes. The suppression thus spread gradually outwards and downwards from the governing strata (samurai members of the Tokugawa household) to the governed (townspeople, peasants, etc). Gonoi Takashi has shown from Jesuit sources that Ieyasu had taken action to prevent the spread of Christianity in his own retinue as early as 1605.5 Although allowing Christianity among the general population in areas he governed, Ieyasu explicitly forbade Christianity among any samurai receiving income in his fiefs. This example is generally used to demonstrate that Ieyasu saw a potential political threat from Christianity as early as 1605. It is therefore noteworthy that the suppression which began in 1612, and ultimately caused the complete annihilation of Christianity in Japan, originated from an instance of Christian believers being discovered among his own retinue. The shogunate proclaimed the order banning Christianity in April 1612.6 It can be seen in the sources that an immediate background factor influencing the issuance of the order was a bribery scandal involving a figure called Okamoto Ōhachi 岡本大八, who turned out to be a Christian. Rather than the incident

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of bribery itself, however, it was a general investigation of samurai in Ieyasu’s retinue, conducted in reaction to the scandal, that seems to have prompted the ban. This investigation, the results of which were presented to Ieyasu two days before the issuance of the ban, showed that 15 members of Ieyasu’s household (or feudal retinue, kajindan 家臣団) had been identified as Christian. The suppression of Christianity thus began in his own household, then spread to the households of other lords in Sunpu (Shizuoka) before extending further from there.7 Rather than having a religious focus, the suppression’s initial impetus came from the Tokugawa rulers’ desire to stabilize their power bases in their heartland of eastern Japan (the Kanto plain and Shizuoka). The suppression followed a similar pattern, on a larger scale, in western Japan, where the vast majority of Christians lived. For instance, one focus of the suppression in western Japan was the so-called ‘Great Exile’ (daitsuihō 大 追放) of December 1614. This incident is well known in Western histories as the occasion on which all foreign priests were banished from Japan. But this was by no means the most important political aspect of this incident, at least in terms of Japanese political history. More significantly, all the Christian domain lords and much of their senior samurai retinues were also banished. These lords were almost exclusively those who had been loyal to Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The Toyotomi family’s claim to the shogunate was to be thoroughly wiped out within a year of the Great Exile, in the summer campaign of 1615 against Osaka castle (the so-called ‘Osaka natsu no jin’ 大坂夏の陣), suggesting that the Great Exile and the suppression of Christianity paved the way for Tokugawa consolidation of power.8 The Tokugawa shogunate’s motivation was immediate and political, and was clearly directed at other warlords. But as the suppression went on, the focus moved from the deportation of notable samurai associated with the Toyotomi to the violent suppression of the lower orders. The popular imagery of the suppression of Christianity in both Japan and abroad today tends to be based on actions taken in this next phase against allegedly Christian ‘ordinary Japanese’. But how and why was the suppression of Christianity extended to townspeople and peasants who, after all, seemed to pose no immediate political or military threat to Tokugawa power?

The spread of the suppression and its political consequences The broad extension of the suppression policy to the general population can be identified with a number of events that occurred in January 1614 – the month that the Shogun Tokugawa Hidetada dispatched the senior shogunate officials Itakura Shigemune 板倉重昌 and Ōkubo Tadachika 大久保忠隣 to Kyoto with a sweeping mandate to ‘banish the priests’.9 In late January 1614 (the beginning of month one of Keichō 19 in the Japanese calendar of the time, and therefore of the celebration of the new year), Ōkubo entered Kyoto, immediately dispatched the Catholic priests to Nagasaki for exile and destroyed the churches. Much more importantly, however, he also launched, on a grand scale, a movement described as ‘Christian revision’ (kirishitan aratame キリシタン改め) – a campaign in which

Early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse 55 the masses were assisted by various ingenious means to ‘revise’ their Christian faith and arrive at the conclusion that they should renounce their Christianity. The gruesome popular imagery of violence and torture associated with the suppression of Christianity in Tokugawa Japan is usually associated with this movement. Implemented firstly in Kyoto and then throughout western Japan, the ‘revision’ movement was notable because it was not directed primarily against the foreign priests but against Japanese, particularly ordinary peasants or townspeople. It deployed images of ‘foreignness’, ‘barbarism’ and ‘otherness’, in other words the imagery of xenophobia, not against ‘outsiders’, but in order to repress those ‘inside’ Japan. It was a movement that primarily targeted neither foreign priests nor powerful samurai clans, but overwhelmingly ordinary Japanese who appeared to present no immediate threat. Although Christianity had been basically wiped out by the 1640s, the ‘Christian aratame’ practices requiring Japanese to ‘prove’ that they were not Christian became increasingly institutionalized during the mid- and later seventeenth century: in 1635 the so-called temple registration system, requiring Japanese of all classes to register with a Buddhist temple or Shinto shrine, was introduced; and other practices like so-called fumie 踏絵 (a variety of practices such as treading on crosses, through which villagers ‘demonstrated’ their non-Christian credentials) were increasingly institutionalized, so that by the 1660s a system of formal, official procedures of registration and practice extended to the entire population of Japan. These measures became collectively known as the aratame system (shūmon aratame no seido 宗門改めの制度). The establishment of this system represented much more than just an instance of anti-Christian activity: it established an institutionalized system of social control extending to the entire population, a system of control that continued to function until the end of the Tokugawa shogunate in the late nineteenth century. The establishment of this system is considered by many scholars to be one of the most enduring and significant events of seventeenth-century Japanese history.10 Indeed, one might even say that, looking today at the historical significance of the suppression of Christianity in Japan, by far the most socially and politically important event for the history of Japan thereafter was the establishment of this control system. So although the ‘Christian thought’ of Japan’s ‘Christian century’ seems to have had little effect on the later development of Japanese political thought, the products of antiChristian thought – in particular the institutionalized aratame system and later traditions of anti-Christian literature – continued to affect Japanese political and intellectual development right through the Tokugawa period and indeed well into the modern era. Interestingly, in much the same way that the aratame system became increasingly institutionalized after the suppression of Christianity had been achieved, so too most anti-Christian literature and discourse emerged after the complete annihilation of Christianity. Most anti-Christian writings were published in the three decades after the last outbreak of anything like open Christian sentiment, the Shimabara Rebellion of 1639.11 The relatively few anti-Christian writings that do date from

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before 1639 also have a very different character to most anti-Christian writing that emerged later. Earlier anti-Christian texts tend to be less literary – they are often official government documents, and in general they have much less of the missionary zeal or propaganda-like qualities of the later, more populist writings. Documents from before the 1630s were almost all either government-produced or written by ‘turned [former] Christians’ (korobi kirsihitan 転びキリシタン).

Proclamations: a call to order One of the most famous early anti-Christian documents is the proclamation that marked the extension of the suppression of Christianity to the general population, Bateren tsuihō no fumi 伴天連追放之文 (Proclamation on the Deportation of Priests). It was issued by Shogun Tokugawa Hidetada in January 1614. Its title and some of its contents resemble the proclamation of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s short-lived proscription of Christianity in 1587, Bateren tsuihōrei 伴天連追放 令 (Order on the Deportation of Priests). Both documents ostensibly criticize Christianity as inferior to the religious traditions of Shinto and Buddhism. The 1587 document, however, was never fully implemented and therefore has less historical significance than the 1614 document, which is generally identified with the full implementation of the suppression of Christianity. As mentioned above, although an official ban on Christianity was first proclaimed in April 1612, an active policy of suppression was extended to the general population only with the issuance of Bateren tsuihō no fumi almost two years later. Despite encompassing the population at large, the proclamation was not intended for general circulation: it was issued as an authority to the newly proclaimed Grand Anti-Christian Inquisitor (Tsuihō sōbugyō 追放総奉行) Ōkubo before his dispatch to Kyoto, and we can therefore assume it was used primarily to communicate the shogun’s intentions and the logic behind the introduction of the suppression to other holders of authority around Kyoto and across western Japan. Probably the most important section of Bateren tsuihō no fumi is the central third or so, where the logic of the suppression policy is explained. Japan, land of the [Shinto] Gods and the Buddhas, reveres the Gods, respects the Buddhas, fulfils the Way of Benevolence and Justice, and implements the laws of good and evil. If there are criminals, then in accordance with the severity of their crime one of the five punishments of tattooing, cutting off their nose, cutting off their foot, castration, or execution is enacted upon them. The Book of Rites says, ‘When we have much mourning, we have the five robes; when we have much crime, we have the five punishments’. If there is doubt of the crime, then using the Gods we enact oaths of proof. We stipulate the criminal codes and discern whether a crime has been committed or not, leaving out not even the smallest thing. Criminals of the Five Crimes and the Ten Sins throw away the Buddhas and Gods, Buddha, Dharma and Clergy, and the life of heaven and earth.12 It is a difficult thing to escape from the misfortune befitting accrued bad deeds. Whether executed by decapitation

Early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse 57 or boiling oil, the crimes committed [will be rewarded] like this.13 This is the Way of encouraging good and discouraging evil.14 They wanted to control evil, but bad deeds were all too easily accrued. They wanted to commend good, but good is all too difficult to preserve. [So] they needed to make clear rules.15 Nowadays is the same as this. … If you do not observe the example of the ancestors, then you should be afraid, very afraid.16 Those Christian Priests and their party all oppose the articles of the law. They hate and doubt the Way of the Gods [Shinto], they ridicule the True Law [Buddhist Dharma], they discard Justice and ruin Goodness. They look at the example of a criminal [Jesus], and become excited, blindly running after him. They themselves pray to him and offer him sacrifice. This is what they take as the object of reverence and salvation in their religion! How is this not heresy? In fact, it is the enemy of the Gods and the enemy of the Buddhas. If we do not swiftly prohibit it now, then in the future the nation will suffer. We must enact the law. If we do not control it, then we invite the punishment of Heaven. Without rest, we must swiftly sweep it from all the territories and lands of the Japanese state. And if there is anyone who stands against this proclamation, then they should be punished.17 Here we can see that, as in the proscription issued in Hideyoshi’s time, national and religious identity is conflated through the use of a Shinto–Buddhist or (if we take the reference to benevolence and justice as Confucian) Shinto– Buddhist–Confucian religious identity to represent Japan. Another important point, however, but one often overlooked, is the document’s emphasis on law, order and punishment. Buddhist and Confucian quotes are frequent, but nearly all relate to crime and punishment. The document, therefore, while beginning with the construction of a dichotomy between ‘Japanese religions’ and Christianity, identifies Confucianism and Buddhism primarily (in more than one-third of the document) in terms of their teachings on social order. The main thrust of the document is not so much the religious dichotomy, but a justification of the use of force in maintaining order. Confucian and Buddhist quotes are used primarily to argue the need for law and order and to legitimate the use of severe force to uphold order. The closest thing to any kind of doctrinal or intellectual argument against Christianity is the charge that Jesus was a criminal, so even the only argument related directly to the nature of the Christian religion is thereby presented in terms of crime and punishment. In short, Bateren tsuihō no fumi primarily justifies the ban on Christianity not through its simple dichotomous depiction of Christianity as ‘foreign’, but rather through its claim that Christianity opposed the systems of law and punishment that upheld order – that it is uniquely and inherently anti-authoritarian through its worship of a criminal. The main emphasis is on religion’s role in the sociopolitical system; the threat from Christianity is not its potential as a strut for foreign invasion or interference, but its challenge to authority and order in a domestic context. Bateren tsuihō no fumi is one of the small minority of anti-Christian writings from before the 1630s. Most others from this period appear to have been written

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by so-called korobi kirishitan, or ‘turned Christians’. These include the 1621 work Hadaiusu by Habian, examined in the previous chapter, and the 1636 work Kengiroku 顕偽録 by Sawano Chūan 沢野忠庵, the apostate Jesuit priest Christovão Ferreira (1580–1650). It seems that another anti-Christian work, Baterenki 伴天連記, was also the work of an apostate priest of this period.18 These texts – not surprisingly considering their authors appear to have been former Jesuits – show a much higher level of knowledge of Christian practice and doctrine than can be found in most anti-Christian writings of subsequent decades. Furthermore, as shown in the discussion of Hadaiusu in the previous chapter, they tend to present arguments supportive of the structure of political control established or maintained by the early Tokugawa regime. The distribution and impact of these texts at the time, however, was very limited. Kengiroku was immediately sealed by the shogunate because it contained reference to Christian doctrine, and never saw the light of day in the Tokugawa period. In fact, the first public reference to the text occurred in 1930.19 Hadaiusu and Baterenki also appear not to have been widely distributed in the early or mid-Tokugawa period.20 Therefore, the only one of these three texts with any significant influence on the development of anti-Christian discourse through the Tokugawa and Meiji periods was Hadaiusu, primarily through its reprinting in 1864.21 Most anti-Christian writings from the early Tokugawa period that affected the development of the discourse and political thought of the later Tokugawa and Meiji periods appeared as part of the large output of populist anti-Christian writings that exploded after the Shimabara Rebellion, through the 1640s, 1650s and 1660s.

Populist texts: a political project After Christianity had been wiped out, in the period from the 1640s onwards, especially through the 1660s, anti-Christian writings not only ballooned in number but also became so widely distributed that some variants could be said to have constituted genres of popular literature.22 Indeed, many of the anti-Christian texts of this period have been described as ‘populist’ works.23 In the same way that the system of kirishitan aratame became more institutionalized after the annihilation of Christianity, so too anti-Christian discourse began to take on a bigger and clearer role as institutionalized propaganda, catering to a comparatively greater and more general readership after Christianity had been extinguished. Unfortunately, however, most previous research on this literature has paid scant attention to the basic sociopolitical context of its production. Instead, it has tended to be presented as an antithesis to Japanese ‘Christian thought’, as part of some clash between imagined categories of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ thought. But this analysis is problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, as mentioned earlier, this anti-Christian discourse was not contemporaneous with Japanese Christian thought but rather emerged several decades after the suppression of Christianity. Secondly and most importantly, as demonstrated in the first chapter of this book, Japanese Christian thought itself was not a simple representation of something we

Early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse 59 might identify as ‘Western thought’ but rather included significant influence from the social context in which it was created in Japan. Furthermore, as will be argued in detail in the following chapters, most of the anti-Christian thought of this period itself does not appear to have been written primarily for the purpose of countering Christianity or Christian ideas but rather with different, clearly domestic priorities in mind. In general, the arguments tend to be political rather than doctrinal.

Kirishitan Monogatari: dehumanization and derision One of the most widely distributed anti-Christian texts in the seventeenth century was Kirishitan Monogatari 吉利支丹物語 (The Tale of the Christians). The original production of this anonymous text is usually attributed to 1639, but its popularization and consequent wide impact appear to date from its reprintings in the 1660s. It is very difficult to isolate any one particular text as an ‘indicative’ or ‘representative’ text of the anti-Christian discourse of the post Shimabara Rebellion (post-1639) period, but Kirishitan Monogatari is probably the nearest approximation. This is not only because Kirishitan Monogatari appears to have been well distributed at the time, but also because of the text’s presentation of political, historical and doctrinal arguments in plain populist language in a narrative (monogatari) style. In terms of understanding the nature of the variety of populist anti-Christian texts that emerged in the decades after Shimabara, therefore, it is a very useful source. Kirishitan Monogatari deals at length with stories relating to the actual suppression of Christianity in the decades preceding its production. The text portrays the suppression positively, even glowingly, in a propagandist style. Given this fact, it is interesting that Kirishitan Monogatari makes no attempt to hide or mitigate the acts of violence accompanying the suppression; indeed, it highlights acts of violence as subjects of humour and entertainment.24 Significantly, there is no argument in the text justifying the violence; its victims are simply identified as ‘Christians’ and there is no further explanation as to why they should be violently persecuted. In official texts issued by the shogunate such as Bateren tsuihō no fumi, there are arguments clearly explaining why the Christians should be cast out, and justifying the repression to follow. There, it is argued that repression is necessary to prevent Christianity from disturbing the domestic political order in Japan. But in Kirishitan Monogatari we see no such argument: the closest thing to a justification of anti-Christian violence is an insidious presentation of the Christians as ‘weird’ (kaze kawari 風代り), ‘foreign-like’ (ikokufū 異国風, interestingly not ‘foreign’), ‘base’ (gehin 下品) and ‘odd’ (kimyō 奇妙).25 It is this creation of an ‘image’ of (predominantly Japanese) Christians as a strange ‘Other’ that appears to justify the entertainment value of anti-Christian violence presented through the text. One good example is a section of Kirishitan Monogatari concerning a group of Franciscans. After acknowledging the work of the Franciscans in healing the sick, the text goes on to gleefully narrate the Franciscans being transported to Nagasaki on a cart, having their ears and noses cut off and then being crucified.26

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But why should this kind of treatment of people healing the sick be such a cause of celebration? The answer to this question lies in the earlier narration of the actual medical practice and other activities of the Franciscans: Kirishitan Monogatari makes it clear that many of the patients suffer from leprosy and other socially problematic sicknesses; moreover, many of the patients are ‘kabukimono’ かぶ きもの or ‘hinin kojiki mono’ 非人乞食ども27 – that is, ‘travellers’/‘hoboes’, or members of lower or excluded castes or social groups.28 It is also argued that on being cured, it is these kinds of Japanese who then go on to convert to Christianity. The Japanese Christians themselves are thereby described in the text as being ‘a rabble of idiots and weirdos’.29 In place of a justification of the violent suppression of Christianity, then, comes this image of Christian people that dehumanizes them, just as Kirishitan Monogatari also dehumanizes Western Catholics. In the end they thereby come to be considered, just like the Europeans, as ‘devils in human form’.30 This image of Christians as anti-social and dehumanized is central to the way Kirishitan Monogatari functions. Images from the opening section of the text, where the foreign Catholic priests are described as ‘long-nosed … with long fingernails and toenails, tall and dark-skinned with red noses and teeth longer than those of horses’,31 are extended to also create a dehumanizing image of Japanese Christians as ‘beasts with no culture’.32 In both cases, the violence against them seems justified through this process of dehumanization. It is often argued that the major beef with Christianity in Kirishitan Monogatari and many other anti-Christian texts of this period is the so-called ‘invasion theory’ – that the propagation of the Christian religion was part of a European plot to conquer Japan. But often when Christianity is presented as part of a plot of conquest, that conquest is specifically referred to as one not requiring invasion. In a chapter of Kirishitan Monogatari entitled ‘Actions of the plotters wanting to subjugate Japan to the Southern Barbarians’, it is made clear that the Christian plan is to increase the number of Christians in Japan to such an extent that, ‘without firing one arrow, they can take the country’.33 In other words, the so-called ‘invasion theory’, at least in Kirishitan Monogatari, was not actually a theory of military invasion of Japan, but rather a discourse identifying Christianity as a threat to the intellectual, religious and political integrity of Japan. If we look at Kirishitan Monogatari in its entirety we see that even this argument is present in only one chapter of the text. It is not used throughout the work as a major justification of the repression. Compared with the 1614 Bateren tsuihō no fumi’s clear enunciation of the justification for the introduction of the suppression of Christianity, Kirishitan Monogatari instead relies primarily on a dehumanized image of Christians. This could well be related to the relative periods of the production of each text. When Bateren tsuihō no fumi was produced, there were still many openly Christian Japanese, including in positions of relative authority. Many ‘ordinary Japanese’ at this time would have had neighbours, friends or colleagues who were Christian. By the time Kirishitan Monogatari came to be widely distributed in the 1660s, however, no Christians were living openly in general society. The violence

Early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse 61 against Christians committed by the state in the full view of the public between 1614 and 1640 probably itself assisted in dehumanizing Christian people in the consciousness of many other Japanese.

Suzuki Shōsan: tradition as legitimation Kirishitan Monogatari first appeared immediately after the Shimabara Rebellion in 1639 and was a clearly populist text designed for a wide readership and written primarily in kana (Japanese phonetic characters and with minimal Chinese ideographic character kanji use). It is therefore often identified as the first of a genre of populist anti-Christian texts that emerged in the decades after the rebellion.34 Most other texts in this genre emerged from the 1660s. With the exception of the Japanese Chinese-language kanbun text Jakyō taii 邪教大意 (also known as Taijijashūron 対治邪執論) of 1648, all the commonly referenced anti-Christian documents from the post-Shimabara period to the end of the seventeenth century were written in kana. Much of the production and printing of this kind of populist text during the 1660s appears to have been by driven by Suzuki Shōsan 鈴木正 三 (1579–1655) and his associates. Examples include Shōsan’s own Hakirishitan 破吉利支丹; his disciple Echū’s 恵中 Kaijō Monogatari 海上物語; Asai Ryōi’s 浅井了意 Kirishitan Hakyaku ronden 鬼理至端破却論伝; and the 1662 reprint of Kirishitan Monogatari, Kirishitantaiji Monogatari 吉利支丹退治物語. The late 1600s also saw the publication of a range of populist monogatari style anti-Christian historical fiction, with some stories taking the suppression of the Shimabara Rebellion as a theme and portraying it as a kind of anti-Christian crusade. Such texts included Kirishitan shūmon raichō jikki 切支丹宗門来朝実 記 (Record of the Coming of the Christians to Japan); Amakusa sōdō 天草騒 動 (The Disorder at Amakusa); Amakusa gassenki 天草合戦記 (Records of the Battle of Amakusa); Nanbanji Monogatari 南蛮寺物語 (Stories of the Temple of the Southern Barbarians); and Nanbanji kōhaiki 南蛮寺興廃記 (The Rise and Fall of the Temple of the Southern Barbarians).35 Suzuki Shōsan’s Hakirishitan (Smash the Christians) is considered one of the most important texts of this boom in anti-Christian discourse beginning in the 1660s. This is because as well as having a particularly wide distribution, the text’s argument is also quite representative of the kind of doctrinal position taken not only by Shōsan but also by other writers around him who generated some of the other texts of this boom. Hakirishitan, like Bateren tsuihō no fumi, emphasizes a construction of Shinto–Buddhist synthesis as a Japanese national religious culture opposed to Christianity.36 In Hakirishitan, however, this construction is described in a clearly more complex manner. Bateren tsuihō no fumi commends the Shinto–Buddhist combination in opposition to Christianity by stating that in a corrupted world, Shinto and Buddhism resurrect the correct and proper customs and ways of the past.37 In Hakirishitan, Shōsan develops this further by articulating exactly how Buddhism and Shinto support order, and what kind of order they support. Beginning by agreeing that Shinto and Buddhism represent the traditional customs of Japan,

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Shōsan moves on to argue that traditions of political society, and the order that emerges from them, are elements of nature. The one Buddha of thusness (shinnyo 真如, the nature of reality) transforms and is then accepted into the minds of men. So the mind [of men] which respects and reveres the gods is [also] transmitting this one Buddha. For instance, respecting and revering the sovereign, beginning with the vassals and ministers, step by step down to the local officials and then to the peasants, this respect of each relevant official at each level is the ordained Law [Dharma of the Buddha]. This is the righteousness of each person respecting one person above them. How can teachings like Christianity, which posit just one person above [all] to respect, using no subordinates [as representatives], be considered correct?38 Here Shōsan argues that the current political order is ‘originated by the gods and transmitted down through the traditions of this country’,39 and that thereby through tradition and custom, the ‘one Buddha of thusness’, the mind of current existence, is (should be) linked to the political order. Between above and below, between the gods and the people, social custom and the political order stand as mediators. The major point of Shōsan’s criticism is that in Christian teachings this level of demarcated step-by-step mediation does not exist. The Christians, in Shōsan’s view, by ignoring the ordained nature of political custom transmitted through tradition, thereby ignore the nature of reality (shinnyo 真如). This identification by Shōsan of the gods, Buddha and the human mind as immanently present in the political order has been referred to by Ōkuwa Hitoshi as representative of a philosophical ‘idealism’ discernible in Shōsan’s thought.40 At a more grounded political level, however, it is more important to point out the inherent essentialism and conservatism of this position. Hakirishitan adds a level of doctrinal argument to Bateren tsuihō no fumi’s criticism of Christianity as politically subversive and its championing of Shinto–Buddhism as ensuring the stability of order through religiously supporting the systems of social control (custom). Shōsan also employs Buddhist metaphysics to criticize elements of Christian doctrine such as the theory of creation and the differentiation between animals and human beings.41 These arguments typically construct an image of Christianity as a mystical and superstitious religion, a kind of heretical, esoteric faith.42 Like Kirishitan Monogatari, Hakirishitan also narrates episodes of violence against Christians, but this violence is clearly justified through arguments that mix Shinto–Buddhist doctrine with a kind of nationalist Japan-centrism. The Buddha of their country [Christ of the European countries] is not a Buddha. It has no history and no divine virtues. Its crimes are terrible. The punishments of Heaven, the Buddha, the gods and of man must all be visited upon them. Every one of them [the Christians] needs to be strung up and killed.43

Early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse 63 Although overall Shōsan does employ Buddhist doctrine more positively and comprehensively than other earlier populist anti-Christian discourses, in the end his main argument is based around the same central pillar and same general political–intellectual stance as other contemporary documents such as Bateren tsuihō no fumi and Kirishitan Monogatari. Like Kirishitan Monogatari, Hakirishitan emphasizes a portrayal of Christians as foreign(-like) Others. But the central argument of Hakirishitan is that Christianity as a teaching threatens the traditional social-customary relations that underlie the stability of the current regime’s political control systems. As in Bateren tsuihō no fumi, this is the core reason given for the need to suppress Christianity. Shōsan, however, goes further by using Buddhist doctrine to overtly link the political control systems of the Tokugawa state (in particular, the idea of loyalty to each stage of the political control process) to an idea of tradition and custom. Shōsan presents the existent political order as a reflection of the ‘traditions and customs’ of the ‘country’, traditions and customs that furthermore are sold as being inherently good owing to the very fact that they are ‘traditional’. It was through the Buddhist doctrinal ornamentation of this inherently state-centric, typically Confucian, standpoint that Shōsan’s writings made their mark. His use here of almost a proto-nationalism by emphasizing not just traditions and customs, but ‘Japanese’ traditions and customs, coupled with his emphasis on what he saw as the superstitious nature of Christianity against the more reasonable tone of Buddhism is what has led some historians such as Nakamura Hajime to identify Suzuki Shōsan as a herald of ‘Japanese modernity’.44 Leaving such assertions aside, we can certainly agree with Nakamura that the core of Shōsan’s argument revolved around politics and statecraft, doctrine being deployed in support. This is not to say that there were no purely doctrinal arguments in the antiChristian discourse of this period. One prominent example of a doctrinal/religious argument that does come up in certain texts of this period relates to the issue of redemption. The Christian doctrine of Christ’s forgiveness of sin is a particular object of criticism found in a range of different Japanese anti-Christian texts. In Hadaiusu, for instance, as touched on in the previous chapter, the premise of God setting up a situation where Adam and Eve would commit sin was in itself judged by Habian as an immoral and unethical act (on God’s part). Likewise, many other anti-Christian criticisms of the doctrine of redemption focus on the premise of original sin. They point out that redemption from sin based on Christ’s crucifixion is only necessary because of the ridiculous teachings that in the first place attributed the existence of original sin to the Adam and Eve fable. Habian’s view was simply that for the almighty Christian God not to intervene when he saw that a sin was about to occur was manifestly unjust and unrighteous. Did [the Christian] God not know that Adam was about to break the commandment? If he did not know, then he is not all-knowing of the three worlds. If he did know, then it was his duty in terms of benevolence to tell

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Kumazawa hakukei no hajasetsu 熊沢伯継の破邪説, a text attributed to Kumazawa Banzan contains the same argument,46 and it can also be found in Arai Hakuseki’s early eighteenth-century work Seiyō kibun 西洋紀聞.47 Another doctrinally based argument seen repeatedly in both Confucian and Buddhist texts is the assertion that Christianity evolved from Buddhism as a heretical sect of that religion. In Confucian texts, this argument is sometimes used to criticize Buddhism. Examples of this can be seen in the works of Kumazawa Banzan and Hayashi Razan.48 But the argument is also used by Buddhists themselves as part of a criticism of Christianity. This can be seen for instance in the famous early Tokugawa Buddhist anti-Christian text Jakyō Taii by Sessō Sōsai 雪窓宗崔.49 Looking at the distribution of the anti-Christian texts in early Tokugawa society as a whole, however, it seems clear that these kinds of doctrinal arguments were far from representative of the general nature of the main anti-Christian discourses of the period. Sessō Sōsai’s Jakyō Taii is a relatively famous text that appears to have enjoyed a level of distribution superior to that of any other Buddhist antiChristian text of the period written in Classical Chinese (kanbun).50 Nevertheless, compared with the anti-Christian texts of the same period written in Japanese (kana) its distribution was highly limited. It was this latter genre of anti-Christian literature that dominated the field. Even in relatively doctrinally complex texts such as Sessō Sōsai’s, however, the core of the anti-Christian argument is never based in doctrinal issues. As Ōkuwa Hitoshi’s comprehensive research on Chinese-language texts by Sessō Sōsai and other related Buddhists of the period has shown, ‘there is no doubt that the foundation [of the anti-Christian argument] is the threat of a Christian invasion’.51 Therefore the doctrinal elements of these texts, in the context of early Tokugawa society, did not appear to possess the rhetorical utility of the more political arguments. This is particularly clear in the case of texts from the period that went on to have the greatest impact and appear to have been the most widely distributed at the time (such as Kirishitan Monogatari and Hakirishitan). Importantly, it was also this latter kind of text which dominated the modern ‘canon’ of anti-Christian works studied in the twentieth century.

The ‘anti-Christian canon’ reconsidered: politics over doctrine Above we have cursorily examined a range of the most typically researched Japanese anti-Christian literature of the seventeenth century. These texts, some produced in the early 1600s, most in the latter half of the century, were popularized from the 1660s onwards; and until now they have been commonly viewed as representative of the early Tokugawa period’s ‘anti-Christian canon’. From our

Early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse 65 examination of these texts and their interaction, it is possible to make a number of observations about the general nature of this anti-Christian discourse. One clear conclusion is that in the official documents issued by the shogunate at the beginning of the suppression, as confirmed in Bateren tsuihō no fumi, the banning of Christianity was not justified predominantly by presenting Christians as ‘foreign’ or ‘Other’. Instead, Christianity was criticized, particularly in comparison with Shinto, Buddhism and Confucianism, for the fact that its teachings appeared not to acknowledge the structures of political control that supported the stability of the current political order. In contrast to this, from the mid-1600s onwards, widely distributed populist anti-Christian propaganda like Kirishitan Monogatari created an image of Christians that used xenophobic discourses to present them as exotic, foreign-like Others. In this context, however, the xenophobic or exclusivist discourse was clearly not aimed at non-Japanese, but at ‘lepers’, ‘travellers’ or ‘hoboes’, and members of other excluded social castes (hinin, for instance). In other words, the foreign image was used to amplify a discourse aimed at dehumanizing certain Japanese people. We should bear in mind that by the time Kirishitan Monogatari was published (and particularly by the time of its popularization and mass printing in the 1660s) there were no nonJapanese Christians and virtually no Japanese Christians in Japan. This discourse, therefore, was clearly not aimed at foreigners, and needs to be considered as a rhetorical device used to justify discrimination amongst Japanese people. In this sense it is reminiscent of Carol Gluck’s discussion of the construction of the ‘metaphysical foreigner’ in modern Japanese history.52 Another issue common to anti-Christian texts of this period is the problem of the so-called ‘invasion theory’. In reality – as seen in Kirishitan Monogatari – most anti-Christian references to a foreign takeover of Japan through Christianity do not speak of invasion but rather of ‘taking the country without an arrow being fired’. In other words, the threat of Christianity is seen in terms of its effect on the Japanese people – that it may avert their loyalty from the current order to another political object. This argument is intimately related to a dominant theme of Bateren tsuihō no fumi, Kirishitan Monogatari and Hakirishitan: the idea that ‘traditions’ inherent to ‘our country’ underlie preservation of the current order. As has been touched upon in reference to the theories of Nakamura Hajime, and as will be extrapolated later in this book, this aspect of the ‘anti-Christian canon’ has important implications for our consideration of the issue of modern ideology formation in Japan. While Hakirishitan also contains xenophobic imagery and argumentation, its main point is to positively emphasize the role of (Shinto– Buddhist) religion in generating and preserving a world of religiously integrated custom and tradition that inherently acts to preserve the current political order. Ultimately, Shōsan’s main criticism of Christianity is that it does not have this same relationship to custom and order. Although arguments based around social exclusivity or xenophobia, emphasized in so much of the secondary literature, can be seen in supporting roles in some of these texts, the creation of this discourse is clearly not the main point, motivation, or object of the anti-Christian discourse of this period. Rather, anti-Christian

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discourse appears as a predominantly political rhetoric that constructs a relationship between certain religious traditions, concepts of past, custom and tradition on the one hand, and the maintenance of the current political order on the other. The defining characteristic is not cultural xenophobia but political conservatism. The government-issued proclamations and the popular literature of the seventeenth century have, until now, been the sources on which most research has concentrated as constituting the early Tokugawa period’s anti-Christian discourse or ‘canon’. But there was also an entirely separate contemporaneous field in Japan where anti-Christian discourse was deployed – a field that until now has gone virtually unexamined. That was the field of foreign relations. A number of the important diplomatic documents between the early Tokugawa government of Japan and other states reveal significant employment of anti-Christian discourse. As will be discussed below, the way that discourse was employed varied and developed in relation to the changing international environment of the seventeenth century. But one interesting, easily discernible aspect of that discourse – and one quite different to the discourse in the documents examined above – is the creation of and reliance upon the idea of a ‘Confucian– Christian’ dichotomy in terms of which discussion of diplomacy occurs. Before advancing to look at those diplomatic documents, we should therefore pause to first consider one important and renowned anti-Christian text from Japan’s seventeenth century that we have not yet examined: Haiyaso 排耶蘇, the text most associated with a clash between Confucianism and Christianity in early Tokugawa Japan, and one that again involves Habian. In Haiyaso, however, rather than Habian displaying Confucian influence as we have seen above, he is caricatured as the ultimate anti-Confucian Christian, engaged in a stereotyped, simplistic and polarized debate with the Confucian Hayashi Razan.

Haiyaso: constructing a Confucian–Christian dichotomy Haiyaso is a short document that claims to be the record of a debate held in 1606 between the (then) Jesuit Habian and a young Hayashi Razan in Kyoto. It appears in Hayashi Razan Bunshū, a posthumous collection of Hayashi Razan’s writings first published in 1661 by Razan’s son Hayashi Gahō 林鵞峰. In Haiyaso, Razan employs the kind of Zhu Xi-ist Confucianism discussed in the previous chapter to argue against various scholastic, religious and scientific arguments of ‘the Christians’ (yaso 耶蘇), who are represented by Habian (referred to in this text as Fukan 不干). Haiyaso is probably the most famous and certainly most oft-quoted of Razan’s large corpus of anti-Christian writings. Because of its structure as a purported record of debate between Habian and Razan, this text has repeatedly been offered up by specialist academic and popular historians alike as the classic example of a clash between Western Christian thought and the ascendant Neo-Confucianism of the early Tokugawa period. Haiyaso has thereby become a highly significant text in the quest to understand the nature of Japanese Christian thought, early Tokugawa Confucian thought, and their interaction in the context of anti-Christian

Early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse 67 discourse. In particular, it is the text which is seen to have established the idea of a conflict between Confucianism and Christianity in early Tokugawa society.53 Haiyaso opens with Razan identifying Habian as his debating opponent and referring to a text identified as Myōtei Mondō. I also saw the text Myōtei Mondō. This is a work of Fukan’s. I got him to read from it. The text is presented as a dialogue between two nuns, Myōshū and Yūtei. It discusses Buddhism (the ten sects as well as Ikkō and Nichiren sects, so twelve sects), Confucianism and Shinto. It is not worth looking at. It is all verbose ranting strung together in vulgar Japanese.54 Despite this description, however, there is little discussion of major issues from Myōtei Mondō to be found in Haiyaso. Instead, the treatment is limited to two subjects that both seem to derive from Chinese rather than Japanese Christian texts: a discussion on whether the earth is round or not, and a discussion on part of Matteo Ricci’s creation theory. Both refer directly to texts produced by Ricci in China, and the examination of Ricci’s explanation of creation and metaphysics quite clearly begins with a quote from Tianzhu Shiyi. [Razan says:] ‘Matteo Ricci the Jesuit writes, “Heaven and Earth, spirits, and the souls of men have a beginning but no end”. I do not believe this. If there is a beginning, there must be an end.’55 This discussion not only begins with a quote from Ricci, but in the contents of the discussion itself, the comments of Fukan (as Habian is called in Haiyaso) are not consistent with Habian’s creation theory. Fukan, not gathering what had been said, states: ‘The occurrence of an idea which creates an implement is what enables Principle. Before the occurrence of the idea there exists a non-sentient, unthinking substance. So substance precedes Principle.’56 As noted in our discussion of Myōtei Mondō, Habian’s creation theory develops through anima categories and is closely related to a particular view of humanity. Neither of these elements are present in Haiyaso. In this argument, Fukan posits God as the creator of all things as ‘substance’ and therefore argues that ‘substance precedes’ all else. Although some aspects of the use of the term ‘substance’ here agree with Myōtei Mondō, the characteristics of God outlined here do not. In Myōtei Mondō, Habian criticizes the Buddhist concept of musō munen 無想無念 (non-sentient unthinking) and contrasts it with Deus ittai デウス一体 (God the One Form), who, he emphasizes, is yūchi yūtoku 有智有徳 (wise and virtuous). In Myōtei Mondō, Habian’s criticism of Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto interprets Buddhist emptiness (kū 空) and Confucian and Shinto Yin and Yang as scholastic materia prima, making a theme of contrasting the non-sentient unthinking materia prima against the wise and virtuous God.57 The characteristic

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of God as being sentient and virtuous, not simply a value-free, unthinking substance like materia prima, provides the basis for Habian’s attack on Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto.58 It is also the launching pad for Habian’s explication of creation and anima categories.59 The fact that such a key idea in Myōtei Mondō, indeed the underpinning of the bulk of its argument, is contradicted by Fukan in Haiyaso, suggests that the text does not accurately record what Habian said – if indeed this debate actually ever did occur and he was present. Interestingly, Razan instead presents ‘Christian thought’ through the paradigm of Ricci to recreate the narrative of a sectarian clash between Confucianism and Christianity. The other argument present in the text about the world being round also fits this paradigm. Myōtei Mondō mentions geography only fleetingly in its introduction, but Haiyaso does not touch on that discussion. Rather Haiyaso refers to a map which appears to be Ricci’s Kunyu wanguo quantu 坤輿萬國全圖.60 In discussion on both of the above topics, indeed throughout Haiyaso, Fukan uses completely different language to that used by Habian in Myōtei Mondō. Not only is Habian’s preferred word for God, Deus, replaced by Tenshu 天主 (Ch. Tianzhu, used by Ricci and the Chinese Jesuits for God), but also a whole range of other words represented by katakana versions of Latin words in Myōtei Mondō fail to appear in Haiyaso, which uses Ricci-esque Chinese character translation throughout.61 The Fukan of Haiyaso seems markedly different to the Habian who advances a humanistic position based on a creation theory outlined in scholastic Latin vocabulary in Myōtei Mondō. Not only Habian’s language, but also his core ideas are all absent from Haiyaso. Conversely, a number of the ideas expressed by Fukan in Haiyaso clearly and directly contradict ideas expressed by Habian only one year before this debate is supposed to have taken place. Until now, it has been accepted at face value that Haiyaso is an exactly contemporaneous record of a real 1606 debate between Habian and Razan, as claimed in Hayashi Razan Bunshū in 1662.62 But there are reasons to doubt this. First, as mentioned above, the representation of Habian’s ideas in Haiyaso is seriously at odds with what we know of his ideas published only one year before the debate is supposed to have taken place. Second, while no arguments from Myōtei Mondō appear in Habian’s statements as recorded in Haiyaso, there are repeated references to works by Matteo Ricci which had only recently been written in 1606, and which were only widely referenced in Japan many years after this.63 Third, Haiyaso does not seem compatible with the style or content of what is supposed to be a contemporaneous writing by Razan, the 1610 Nagasaki Itsuji; nor does Haiyaso seem consistent with the general development of Razan’s writings in Hayashi Razan Bunshū and elsewhere. In Haiyaso, Razan quotes texts by Matteo Ricci, demonstrating a fair knowledge of the basic tenets of scholastic creation theory as expressed in Chinese Jesuit writings. Nagasaki Itsuji is a 1610 record of a trip made to Nagasaki where Razan remarks upon the profiteering motivation of Japanese who convert to Christianity. Nagasaki Itsuji describes Christianity almost anthropologically, in a much more detached, descriptive and disengaged style than in Haiyaso.

Early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse 69 They [the barbarians] make a religion of worshipping Heaven. They call it Yaso, it has also been called Tenshu. Their book is written horizontally and bound Japanese-style. Their teachings are to do with karma, life and death. I wonder if perhaps they might not be a kind of Mohammedan folk.64 This descriptive and rather detached report in the 1610 Nagasaki Itsuji seems rather strange if indeed Razan had, as is indicated in Haiyaso, read Habian’s Myōtei Mondō and Matteo Ricci’s Tianzhu Shiyi fully and debated a Jesuit scholastic by 1606. Haiyaso suggests Razan as a 24-year-old Confucian in Kyoto who had read both these very recent and rather strange books and been given the opportunity to debate a much older and at the time extremely senior and busy Habian. Given the dates from which Tianzhu Shiyi was imported into Japan, however, it seems unlikely, if nevertheless possible, that it would have been generally available in Kyoto by this time, and that Razan could have yet read it.65 Nagasaki itsuji presents a 28-year-old Razan who does not seem to have become an expert on Christianity. On a trip to Nagasaki he makes a few simple and casual observations about this strange Christian religion, and that is all. Razan’s voice in Nagasaki itsuji is not that of a man who had read Ricci and Habian and debated issues of astronomy and religion with the latter at the age of 24. The two representations do not match. So which is true? The case against Haiyaso and in favour of Nagasaki Itsuji’s authenticity is a strong one, strengthened when we look at their relative positions in Hayashi Razan Bunshū. Nagasaki Itsuji appears within Hayashi Razan Bunshū in a fairly natural location in a kiji 記事 section in Book 22 after a document written in 1607 (Tōgyō Nichiroku 東行日録), and before a note on the availability of Sunpu Nikki 駿府日 記 (a document which was supposed to have been composed in 1614 and would have included entries for 1610). In other words, it appears among other similar genres of document written around the same time. The placement of Haiyaso, however, is more suspicious. Haiyaso appears towards the end of Hayashi Razan Bunshū in a zatsu 雑 (Ch. za) section, Book 56. Zatsu (miscellaneous) sections of bunshū (collected documents), as the name suggests, usually comprise a range of writings on a variety of topics. But if we look to the kind of Chinese prototype upon which Hayashi Razan Bunshū may have been based, we can see a big difference between the zatsu genre as it stands in Zhu Xi Wenji 朱熹文集 for instance, and as it is conceived in Hayashi Razan Bunshū. In Zhu Xi Wenji the zatsu sections contain a variety of essays, but nearly all on key philosophical issues.66 Hayashi Razan Bunshū’s zatsu sections, however, are composed predominantly of polemical factional assaults on non-Confucian philosophical and religious traditions competing with Razan. Haiyaso appears in Hayashi Razan Bunshū in a context where the three documents appearing directly before it are also similar diatribes against non-Confucian traditions. The text directly before Haiyaso, entitled Sannin wo satosu 諭三人, attacks Buddhist metaphysics. The text before that one, Zento wo tsugu 告禅徒, derides the (lack of) ethics of Buddhist monks. The text before it, Shakurō 釈老, attacks Buddhist and Taoist asceticism.67 In other words, much of the zatsu section is clearly conceived as a platform on which

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to attack religious practice and ideas that Razan regarded as heterodox. These are articles written in a style which bears more in common with Razan’s later period of writing from the 1650s, as will be discussed further in the next chapter. In other words, the placement of Haiyaso in Hayashi Razan Bunshū amongst seemingly much later writings casts further doubt over the likelihood of this text having been authored in the first decade of the 1600s as claimed. Through Haiyaso, Razan (some time in the first half of the1600s) sought to portray both the Japanese and Chinese Jesuit traditions, including Habian, as representing a single homogeneous ideological/religious world view. Razan held up this created image of Christianity in a similarly simplified dichotomy with orthodox Confucianism. This constructed duality allowed him to create a binary rhetorical framework in which all political ideas could be labelled either Christian or Confucian, orthodox or heterodox. The Fukan we see in Haiyaso appears to be a reconstruction of Habian, a fabrication to fit that rhetorical imperative. The use of this document, therefore, to reconstruct a historical image of Habian, as it has been used extensively in previous research, is highly problematic.68 Whatever Razan’s inaccuracies concerning Habian, it is clear that Razan sought to use his own interpretation of Confucianism polemically against a constructed image of Christianity. As will become clear in later chapters of this book, this kind of early anti-Christian discourse set the standard for later broadscale use of an ‘image’ of Christianity to reinforce intellectual orthodoxies and launch sectarian attacks on any thinkers (Buddhist, Confucian or otherwise) who did not conform to these standards. At this time, however, the clearest, most politically important – and until now most overlooked – arena in which this kind of rhetoric was employed was in diplomacy. Japanese anti-Christian discourse was not only used within the borders of the Japanese state, but furthermore was used beyond those borders as part of the international relations discourse through which the early Tokugawa government established the very integrity and validity of that state abroad.

Diplomatic correspondence: in search of a Confucian base The anti-Christian discourse examined above was produced for a domestic audience, and with domestic imperatives in mind. Also, although a couple of documents like Bateren tsuihō no fumi were originated by the state, the vast majority of famous anti-Christian documents from this period, like those examined above, were not. In addition to these kinds of texts, however, there was also another anti-Christian discourse being developed for use in a broader political context – the context of diplomacy and interstate relations in east Asia. These were documents authored on behalf of the Japanese state for use with other states or extra-state entities in the international environment. In this context, the exoticized images of difference and the Other, the constructed dichotomies of normality and abnormality, inner and outer, which we saw deployed in populist domestic anti-Christian discourses above, were systematized and developed within a much more complex and developed framework of political thought. This process of the development of

Early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse 71 anti-Christian discourse occurred in parallel with a process of systematization of Japan’s international relations in east Asia. In the domestic populist anti-Christian discourse, exoticized images of the Christian ‘Other’ were deployed to justify authority in general, and antiChristian action in particular. In this discourse, Christians were portrayed fairly simplistically as an ‘Other’ which should be the object of criticism because it was different. Almost all the major anti-Christian writings of this period, however, with the single exception of Haiyaso by Hayashi Razan, failed to articulate exactly what the ‘non-heretic’ (or in other words, the intellectual orthodoxy) actually was. Some texts referred to a Shinto–Buddhist–Confucian synthesis (sankyō icchiron), but again, its nature was never clearly articulated. In this context, the exact definition of what was ‘heretical’ and what was ‘orthodox’ was determined pretty much on a case-by-case basis, relying on the rhetorical imperatives of the particular moment and the context in which the argument was framed. In other words, most anti-Christian discourse, especially the populist writings that dominated the field, sprung not from some grounded intellectual orthodoxy, but relied on norms that were fluid and subject to change depending on time and place. Although such a rhetorical structure possessed obvious advantages in terms of flexibility, it also meant that Japanese anti-Christian discourse was potentially isolated within the particularistic and momentary space and time of early seventeenth-century Japanese history, politics and culture, and did not possess elements enabling it to be easily supported outside of that space and time. From the perspective of Japan’s external relations, or indeed from the perspective of the historical sustainability of this discourse, this was a potential problem. There was, however, another anti-Christian discourse being developed by a new kind of author.

Hayashi Razan’s diplomatic dichotomies The authorship of Bateren Tsuihō no fumi is often attributed to the monk-scribe and Tokugawa adviser Ishin Sūden 以心崇伝 (1569–1633). The same figure also drafted a significant amount of diplomatic correspondence sent out by the early Tokugawa shogunate.69 Through the 1620s and 1630s, however, the responsibility for the drafting of diplomatic correspondence on behalf of shogunate officials gradually drifted from Sūden to Hayashi Razan. At this time, diplomatic correspondence between Japan, China (the Ming empire) and Korea (the Choson kingdom) increased. This meant that the amount of diplomatic correspondence carried out within the parameters of Confucian discourse also increased, and it was within this discourse space that anti-Christian writings increasingly appeared in Razan’s diplomatic correspondence. In 1625, Razan drafted the diplomatic document Daiming Fukken totoku ni kotafu 答大明福建都督 (Answer to the Governor of Fujian Province of the Great Ming Empire).70 At this time, Sūden was still in charge of producing most of the shogunate’s diplomatic correspondence.71 It was only after the death of the second

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shogun Hidetada in 1632, and Sūden himself in 1633, that Razan, under the third shogun Iemitsu, became the principal author of diplomatic correspondence. Answer to the Governor of Fujian Province of the Great Ming Empire (hereafter referred to as Answer to Fujian) was composed by Razan on behalf of the Prefect of Nagasaki Suetsugu Heizō 末次平蔵 (1546–1630).72 This was the first diplomatic document composed by Razan to include anti-Christian discourse. In it, Razan portrays Christians as exotic and foreign – similar to, but earlier than, the portrayal in many of the documents examined earlier in this chapter. The anti-Christian discourse in this document, however, in terms of context, method and imagery, is much more interesting and contains a much deeper range of meanings than that in Kirishitan Monogatari and the like. Razan does not simply describe the Christians by using exotic and foreign images; he chooses phrases like gekizetsu shuri 鴂舌侏離 that emphasize an image of Christians as ‘barbarian’, in contrast to a civilized image of Sinocentric Confucian culture.73 Through this kind of rhetoric, Razan places Japan metaphorically within the borders of ‘Chinese civilization’ and attempts thereby to utilize what we might today call ‘Sinocentrism’, or even perhaps the discourse of Chinese imperialism, for his own political ends. This can be seen in other passages from Answer to Fujian. The Great Ming selflessly enlightens the islands to her east from where rises the sun [Japan]. This country does good, and has long followed in the footsteps of Chinese culture. We have already cultivated a mind to serve what is great, and fearfully revere Heaven.74 As mentioned above, Answer to Fujian was a reply to the Governor of Fujian, written by Razan on behalf of the Prefect of Nagasaki. In the letter from Fujian to Nagasaki, the Chinese governor had requested that the Japanese authorities control Japanese piracy against Chinese shipping. Lower class Japanese from the coastal areas and others set forth upon the seas, stop licensed Chinese trading vessels and plunder their valuable cargo. You should expeditiously [bring them under] control, clean up the seas, and open the trade routes.75 In relation to this core demand, Razan’s answer (on behalf of Prefect Suetsugu Heizō) was as follows: Our land enforces the law well, and has ordered far and wide that our subjects do not carry out piracy.76 Between this opening and closing of the correspondence, however, Razan develops a range of more interesting arguments within the parameters of the letter. After intimating that Japanese piracy was an issue associated with the Japanese invasion of Choson Korea and consequent war with Ming China77 – a detail Razan

Early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse 73 is diplomatic enough not to overtly articulate – he then moves to his main point, which is that the real cause of piracy is not Japan but, ‘the southern barbarian bestial yabbering magicians, the ones they call the Christians’. The ones they call Christians, disguising themselves as merchants, come and bewitch the stupid masses with their heretic arts. Thereby, worldly people, pursuing the profits of the trading ships, mix with the yabbering barbarians, talking and interacting with them freely. It is due to this that your respectable land has suffered. How terrible. But now, our land is unified, the world is made safe, all has been rectified, and the rule of law is strictly observed. We have cast out the barbarian creed and banned it. The defenses against Christianity are unassailable. And therefore there are no offenders [any more].78 Here, as in Bateren tsuihō no fumi, the danger of Christianity is presented in terms of its threat to the ability of government to control its subjects. Razan argues that by ‘the rule of law’, Japan has eliminated the cause of the problem, the ‘barbarian creed’, and thereby there are no ‘offenders’ any more. What is singular about Answer to Fujian is the particular emphasis of the character of the Christians as ‘barbarians’ in Sinocentric culturalist terms. A dichotomy is clearly established between ‘Chinese civilization’ (within which Japan is placed) and ‘the southern barbarians’. By repeated reference to the southern barbarians’ ‘bestial yabbering’, the existence of the shared linguistic tradition of Classical Chinese is confirmed, and the dichotomy between Japan/China (civilization) and Christianity (barbarism) is strengthened through use of a Confucian–Christian dichotomy. In Bateren tsuihō no fumi, phrases such as ‘Japan is the land of the Buddhas, Japan is the land of the Gods’ presented a simple dichotomy between ‘Japan’ and ‘Other’. This dichotomy is developed into a markedly different regional paradigm in Answer to Fujian, where Razan presents a paradigm of Chinese (including Japanese) civilization versus the rest in terms of a Confucian versus Christian framework. This paradigm places the simple expression of Otherness found in most antiChristian writings within the historically established and set ideological paradigm of ‘civilized versus barbarian’. Japan’s identity as a non-barbarian country, ‘in awe of the mind of Heaven’ is emphasized, and its common cultural heritage with the Ming court appealed to. The explanation of the ban on Christianity and the request for Ming acceptance of the ban is premised by the argument that Japan is a country which places import on ‘the rule of law’ by ‘following in the footsteps of Chinese custom’. This is more than just an attempt to appeal to China: the use of the traditional Chinese ‘civilization versus barbarism’ paradigm, and the construction of a Confucian–Christian dichotomy, allowed for identification with structures of ideology and intellectual orthodoxy reaching beyond the Japanese archipelago. The ‘Christian’ label, which had been marked as heterodoxy in Japan, was associated with, and supported by, an ideological framework capable of identifying it as heterodoxy within the contemporaneous international (east

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Asian) order. This fed back into the domestic arena, allowing the status of this ‘heterodoxy’ to become more solidly defined. It is important to remember here, however, that Answer to Fujian was composed not on behalf of the shogunate (the central government), but only on behalf of the Prefect of Nagasaki.79 At this time, most diplomatic correspondence of the shogunate was still being drafted by Ishin Sūden. Let us next then examine the diplomatic correspondence Razan authored on behalf of the shogunate itself, after Sūden had left the scene. Yaso wo kinzuru jō, Dai Ming no shōsen ni satosu 禁耶蘇状、諭大明之商舶 (The Proscription of Christianity, a Notification to Great Ming Trading Vessels, hereafter referred to as Ming Trading Vessels) was drafted by Razan in 1640 on behalf of a man with whom he had a personal connection, Inoue Masashige 井 上政重 (1585–1661), a very senior shogunate official who in 1639 had been appointed officer in charge of Christianity, or what we might refer to as Grand Inquisitor. In this document, Razan criticizes foreign priests as ‘deceiving the masses and beguiling the people’, following the traditional path of emphasizing the importance of sustaining an order capable of ruling over the masses, and identifying Christianity as a threat to that order.80 As in Answer to Fujian, Ming Trading Vessels emphasizes the ‘barbarian’ characteristics of foreign priests. The kind of barbarian characteristics he emphasizes, and the way he communicates their Otherness, however, differs markedly from Answer to Fujian. In Ming Trading Vessels (a source interestingly contemporaneous with Kirishitan Monogatari), rather than emphasizing the European priests’ cultural differences with Sino-Japanese ‘civilization’, Razan instead emphasizes their physical characteristics. For instance, to ensure that the foreign priests do not get away with, ‘coming to our country by dressing in Chinese or Japanese clothes and stowing away in the holds of your ships’, Razan explains what a European looks like. The foreign priests have ‘cat’s eyes, long noses, red hair, and yabber like beasts’.81 Here again, an exoticized image of the foreign priest is used for rhetorical effect, but not in the same way as in Answer to Fujian. In both letters, Christianity is portrayed as being strange, different and exotic in a manner in some ways reminiscent of Kirishitan Monogatari. But in Answer to Fujian that image is explicitly contrasted with an articulated expression of shared Sino-Japanese cultural identity defined in terms of Chinese ‘civilization’. In Ming Trading Vessels, the primary argument suggesting compliance with Japan’s anti-Christian policy is not an appeal to shared cultural values, but rather the threat of punishment for those not cooperating. The stress in this document is on law and regulation and the coercive power behind them, rather than on a culturally determined shared ethical system. In the lexicon of east Asian political thought, one could perhaps say the emphasis is legalist rather than ethical. More obviously, in power politics terms, the document emphasizes the sovereignty and underlying force of Japanese law rather than the east Asian universalism of a Sinocentric ethical order. The argument of the 1625 Answer to Fujian letter employs a fascinating discourse emphasizing the cultural unities between China and Japan, presenting

Early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse 75 its argument primarily in terms of the Sinocentric ‘civilization versus barbarism’ paradigm. From 1634 onwards, however, and particularly in the diplomatic correspondence from the 1640s on, this discourse is weakened.82

Changes in the east Asian order In order to understand this change in the discourse used in diplomatic correspondence drafted by Razan, it is helpful to consider the changes in the international environment within which Japanese diplomacy was being carried out during this period. Until the 1980s, the policy of the shogunate towards Portugal and Spain, the expulsion of the Catholic clergy, and indeed the implementation of measures against Christians, were often presented together as indicative of a systematic process of implementing a shogunate policy of ‘national isolation’, referred to in Japanese as ‘sakoku’ 鎖国. Since at least the 1980s, however, research specializing in the history of Japanese international relations and trade has questioned the very existence of such a policy or practice.83 Scholars such as Arano Yasunori, Asao Naohiro and Ronald Toby demonstrated that seventeenthcentury policies, which only in the nineteenth century came to be labelled ‘sakoku’, were not part of a plan of isolation, but part of a process whereby the state sought monopolistic control over international relations, under an emerging universalistic paradigm of nation-state regulatory control over borders and trade. According to this perspective, within the ambit of the policies previously labelled ‘isolationist’, the shogunate, far from stopping international contact, actually more positively engaged in the business of conducting and controlling international relations.84 According to this research, the Tokugawa shogunate, after ensuring its own exclusive authority over the relations between overseas countries and Japan, then constructed a system of relations with the countries surrounding Japan that is often referred to as revolving around a ‘Japanese-type civilization versus barbarism order’ (Nihon kei ka’i chitsujo 日本型華夷秩序). The use of the modified Chinese ‘civilization versus barbarism’ paradigm in this ‘order’, however, involved the simultaneous employment of a number of different and often contradictory world views. Arano has described this ‘order’ as a ‘pragmatic’ reaction to the international situation in east Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While Arano sees this system of international relations as having reached maturity in the early eighteenth century, he traces its foundations to the 1630s.85 In the 1625 Answer to Fujian, Razan does not use this kind of ‘Japanese-type civilization versus barbarism’ discourse, but rather relies on a classic rendition of the historical Sinocentric ‘civilization versus barbarism’ paradigm. In the 1630s, however, as first Choson Korea and then Ming China itself were subjugated by the power of the Manchu barbarians to the north (later the Qing empire), the effectiveness of a discourse that emphasized a Sino/Han-centric order became less tenable as a basis of east Asian international relations. This was particularly the case for the shogunate, for which the Manchu expansion and subsequent appropriation of the Chinese dynastic mantle constituted a possible future threat to their own control of Japan. Thus the issue of how, and through what kind of

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discourse, Japan–China relations should be conducted became a complex one for Japanese rulers and thinkers. The kind of discourse seen in Answer to Fujian looks to a framework of international relations based around a shared ethical understanding and discourse based in the history of Chinese thought and literature. This kind of Sino-Japanese relationship continued to be lauded as an ideal by certain thinkers within Japan, at least up to and into the early eighteenth century, as can be seen by the popularity of writings like Nishikawa Joken’s 1708 Ka’itsū shōkō 華夷通商考. But this kind of discourse was never implemented in the reality of shogunal foreign relations. An approach to international relations based on Sinocentric cultural practice was completely unsuitable for Japan at this time, not only because of the structure of governance under the shogunate (which ruled through the domains, and with the emperor removed from central authority), but more importantly because of the contemporary regional situation, with regime change in China precipitating political instability across east Asia. This might be one reason why the kind of discourse seen in Answer to Fujian is not repeated in Razan’s later diplomatic correspondence, of which Ming Trading Vessels is a typical example. The anti-Christian discourse presented in these documents, just like that in contemporaneous populist anti-Christian texts such as Kirishitan Monogatari examined in the previous chapter, presents an image of Christians as exotic foreign Others, and adds to this an emphasis on Christians as presenting an insidious threat to order and stability.86 In this sense, the antiChristian discourse presented in most of Razan’s diplomatic correspondence does have some similarities with the kind of contemporaneous discourse (examined in the sections above) in populist anti-Christian literature. The important difference, however, is that in Razan’s diplomatic writing this discourse was developed within more advanced and culturally institutionalized intellectual frameworks, and, most importantly, deployed by the central state to achieve its political objectives. In other words, two unique and important features are displayed in the anti-Christian writing seen in the diplomatic correspondence authored by Razan: the first is the creation and emphasis of a Confucian–Christian dichotomy that presents both a ‘Sinocentric civilization versus barbarism’ paradigm, and later a ‘Japanese-type civilization versus barbarism order’; the second is the deployment of this discourse by the state, in the name of the state, to achieve state objectives.

Conclusion: anti-Christian discourse as ideological construct and political tool This chapter has re-examined a range of documents constituting the core of what seems to have until recently been considered a kind of representative ‘Japanese anti-Christian canon’ of works. After returning the original anti-Christian shogunal proclamations to the sociopolitical context of their creation, and in particular reminding ourselves of the immediate factional political motivations of the ban on Christianity as part of a move against the Toyotomi in the mid-1610s, the

Early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse 77 chapter then proceeded to re-evaluate the populist anti-Christian writings of the mid-seventeenth century which make up the bulk of the canon. In both Kirishitan Monogatari and Hakirishitan we confirmed that the idea of Christianity as a ‘threat’, whether presented either in terms of its ‘Otherness’ or in terms of an ‘invasion theory’, always centred on the allegation that Christianity would upset the domestic political order of Japan through disturbing hierarchical relations between Japanese. Even in these most xenophobic of anti-Christian texts, the dominant threat was never actually foreign intervention, but rather the Japanese people themselves who were also the clear and obvious targets of the imagery of Otherness deployed in texts such as Kirishitan Monogatari. In Hayashi Razan’s Haiyaso, and in the diplomatic correspondence examined later in the chapter, we observed the development of a more systematized anti-Christian discourse resting on the construction of a Christian–Confucian dichotomy. Analysis of Haiyaso showed how that dichotomy was not based on actual Japanese Christian thought and its relationship with Confucianism, but rather the creation of a simplified polarity similar to that articulated in the conclusion to the previous chapter. The Christian–Confucian dichotomy observed in the diplomatic correspondence was clearly constructed to achieve a direct foreignpolicy purpose. The fact that the nature of the constructs around the dichotomy, namely the construction of the ‘Confucian civilization versus Christian barbarism’ paradigm changed through the early seventeenth century in line with changes in the political climate of east Asia is further evidence of the political, ideological nature of even this very early anti-Christian discourse. In this chapter, even in examining some of the earliest and most standard examples of anti-Christian discourse of the Tokugawa period, we have already been able to observe the absorption of simple xenophobic rhetoric into more pronounced ideological constructs exhibiting almost proto-nationalist aspects. As the next chapter will further demonstrate, both the Confucian–Christian dichotomy framework, and the employment of anti-Christian discourse by the state went on to become major aspects of Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse soon after. This was the foundation of the ideological deployment of anti-Christian discourse, which increased along with the influence of Confucian thought in political discourse and argument during the early Tokugawa period, and continued into the Meiji Restoration as Japan established a ‘modern’ nation state.

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Attacking non-Christian ‘Christians’ Ideological uses of early Tokugawa anti-Christian discourse

The previous chapter examined three different kinds of anti-Christian discourse of the early Tokugawa period: government-authored proclamations associated with the actual repression of Christianity inside Japan; popular literature for domestic consumption inside Japan, written after the repression was complete; and a hitherto overlooked array of diplomatic documentation intended for an overseas rather than a domestic readership. The diplomatic documentation and one other early anti-Christian work authored by Hayashi Razan, Haiyaso, revealed a different kind of anti-Christian writing to the simple xenophobic representations of the Other that are commonly held up as examples of anti-Christian discourse. The diplomatic documentation revealed more nuanced creations of dichotomies between Confucianism and Christianity, which Razan and others tied to a number of different international relations frameworks of the early seventeenth century. These ideological developments in externally focused anti-Christian discourse had parallels in anti-Christian discourse emerging in domestic politics at around the same time. In particular, anti-Christian discourse employed by Hayashi Razan in domestically focused political texts, especially those written in the 1650s when he was at the height of his influence within the shogunate, show interesting similarities to the diplomatic correspondence he had earlier authored on behalf of others. Just as he had employed a Confucian–Christian dichotomy in international relations documents to develop anti-Christian discourse into a politically useful means of answering Chinese queries relating to piracy, so too he adopted a similar dichotomy for rhetorical use in the domestic political conflicts in which he was increasingly involved. The examination of diplomatic documents in the previous chapter offered a glimpse of some of the potential ideological uses of early Japanese anti-Christian discourse. This chapter, by examining Hayashi Razan’s anti-Christian discourse in domestic political confrontations, shows how the use of this discourse began to exhibit clear ideological qualities inside Japan. In this chapter, our inquiry therefore moves away from the anti-Christian discourse of the populist texts making up the ‘Japanese anti-Christian canon’ examined by scholars like Ebisawa and Elison, and focuses rather on an examination of the anti-Christian discourse present in less exoticized, more mainstream political argumentation of early Tokugawa Japan. This chapter will focus particularly on the role of anti-Christian

Attacking non-Christian ‘Christians’ 79 discourse in the writing of, and debates between, mainstream political thinkers of early Tokugawa Japan, particularly Hayashi Razan and Kumazawa Banzan 熊沢 蕃山 (1619–91). Strangely, although the kind of populist Japanese language antiChristian writing dealt with in the first half of the previous chapter had a large amount of scholarly attention lavished upon it through the later twentieth century, the Chinese language anti-Christian writing dealt with in this chapter, although directly involving much more important political figures, has been virtually ignored in most scholarship to date. Closer scrutiny of mid-seventeenth-century works by Razan reveals an antiChristian discourse that has less and less to do with Christianity as it becomes a more broadly deployed rhetorical weapon against any individual or trend that challenged Razan’s intellectual orthodoxy or the Tokugawa shogunate’s political authority.

Confucianism’s role in the early Tokugawa shogunate For most of the Tokugawa period (and indeed much of the following Meiji period) most serious discussion of domestic political issues was carried out through the medium of a complex and developed Confucian discourse. As touched upon in Chapter 2, this discourse, from the beginning of its development early in the Tokugawa period, contained a range of competing philosophical outlooks that at times reflected, or were employed to represent, differences between political groupings and policy agendas. Through the course of the seventeenth century, as Confucianism became increasingly deployed in political discussion, and the number and complexity of Confucian schools and approaches continued to grow in Japan, political confrontations were increasingly represented in terms of conflicts between different Confucian thinkers, often identified as members of different schools. An early example was the conflict that emerged between Hayashi Razan and Kumazawa Banzan in the mid-seventeenth century. Chapter 2 examined some aspects of early seventeenth-century disagreements between Hayashi Razan and Fujiwara Seika over a number of issues of Confucian metaphysics, and their ramifications for political thought. Nevertheless, the conflict between Seika and Razan was primarily doctrinal. Although quoted in the political debates of later periods, at the time it was not a directly political confrontation. The confrontation between Razan and Banzan was political, however, in the sense that there were direct links between their intellectual conflict and real political conflicts, both in regard to structural and policy issues in the development of the new systems of governance being introduced by the shogunate. Before considering the actual source documentation of these confrontations, however, most of which originate from Razan’s hand, we should first revisit the political backdrop to these conflicts. As touched upon in the previous chapter, although Razan had met Tokugawa Ieyasu in the first decade of the 1600s and had been employed by the shogunate both as a lecturer and to write a variety of government documents through the 1620s, it was in 1632–3, with the death of Sūden and the accession of Tokugawa Iemitsu to the shogunate, that Razan

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gained increasing influence. From this time on, Razan authored a range of more important diplomatic documents and had an increasingly pivotal role as a lecturer of Confucian thought in shogunate circles. Nevertheless, Razan’s actual political power within the shogunate – that is, power to actually affect policy and its implementation – was always limited. Although scholars in the early twentieth century often represented Razan as the ‘brain’ of the shogunate, and his interpretation of Confucianism as the ‘official philosophy’ of Tokugawa Japan,1 most research of the later twentieth century has cast doubt on that image and ascribed him a more peripheral role.2 Some have even suggested that his political position within the shogunate was not much more than that of a scribe.3 In terms of the intellectual and literary world of his time, however, there is no doubt that Razan was important enough to have become a symbol of intellectual orthodoxy. This is visible in the way Razan was described by another kind of Japanese Confucian, who hated him. The following description of Razan by the contemporary Confucian thinker Nakae Tōju 中江藤樹 (1608–48) was well known while Razan was still alive: Hayashi Razan has an excellent memory and wide erudition. He proclaims the Way of the Confucians, but this is just pretty words. He learns the law of the Buddhists and has outrageously shaved his head [like a Buddhist monk] … yet he calls himself a true Confucian. In Japan there are no sages, heterodoxies are renewed by the day and multiply each month. The theories of heretics and witches compete with each other for dominance, filling the ears and eyes of the common people, and plunging the realm into filth and squalor. Because of all this there are few today who know virtue. That is why he is pushed forward as the father of the Confucianism of Japan, and many believe his words and imitate his actions.4 This quote shows that during Razan’s lifetime he already had considerable influence and was even considered a source of Confucian orthodoxy by some of the scholar elite. Nevertheless, in government Razan’s political influence was limited, especially when it came to advice on formulation and implementation of mainstream government policy. This role fell to senior vassals and domain lords under the Tokugawas who held the cabinet positions of tairō and rōjū, men such as Sakai Tadakatsu 酒井忠勝 (1587–1662), Inoue Masashige and others. But although Razan was not one of the key political advisers to the shogun, he had very close, regular relations with a number of cabinet ministers who were. Furthermore, other Confucians outside the shogunate were also beginning to exercise direct influence. These senior samurai played major roles in governance and policy formulation, and although this took place at the regional (domain, han), rather than national (shogunate, bakufu) level, their activities were noticed by important political figures in the central government. In particular, the activities of the Lord Ikeda Mitsumasa 池田光正 (1609–82), and his Confucian adviser and administrator Kumazawa Banzan attracted attention. Their substantial administrative reform programme in Bizen Okayama-han 備前岡山藩 became

Attacking non-Christian ‘Christians’ 81 a focus of interest in Edo (Tokyo), to the extent that the reforms in this region came to be seen as a major threat by powerful figures in the central government. In this sense, Banzan’s Confucian-inspired reform agenda in one region affected politics in the central government circle.5 Furthermore, other Confucian figures such as Yamaga Sokō 山鹿素行 (1622–85), while not exercising direct control over policy, were highly regarded by important members of the shogunate, and held positions in direct competition with Razan.6 Because Confucians were, through their impact on governance and policy in the regions, affecting political debate and discussion within the shogunate, Razan’s status as a Confucian had a certain political utility. The Confucian political thinkers used Confucian discourse to explain, justify and defend their reformist policy agendas; therefore, for the anti-reform figures in the shogunate who wanted to discredit these policies, people such as Razan, his brothers, sons and grandsons, who were aligned with the shogunate and could deploy that discourse and argue against reformists on their own Confucian terms, became more valuable assets.

Razan’s ‘late-period anti-Christian discourse’ This chapter focuses on instances where anti-Christian discourse was deployed in these kinds of confrontation, at the heart of intellectual factional conflicts in the early shogunate. These conflicts were often portrayed in ‘school’ terms as a clash between ‘Zhu Xi-ist aligned Confucians’ (notably Razan and his son Gahō) on one side and ‘Yang-ming-ist Confucians’ (particulary Banzan and Tōju but also sometimes Yamaga Sokō) on the other. But often underlying these constructed intellectual factional confrontations were real political, structural and policy confrontations. A number of the ostensibly anti-Christian arguments examined in this chapter have been referred to in previous Japanese-language research as key elements in both major intellectual confrontations within Japanese Confucianism, and also within structural political confrontations between regional and central levels of government in the early Tokugawa shogunal system. The main documents of anti-Christian discourse examined in this chapter are a range of writings by Razan from the 1650s. In academic writing focused on the history of anti-Christian discourse in Japan, in particular the writings of Ebisawa and Elison referred to earlier, these later writings of Razan have gone virtually unexamined. Yet while ignored in the field of Christian history, these writings have always been quoted centrally in historical research that concentrates on early Tokugawa political thought.7 In such mainstream research on Tokugawa political thought, these writings are often described as Razan’s ‘late-period anti-Christian discourse’, in contrast with Haiyaso and the diplomatic documents examined in the previous chapter which are referred to as his ‘early-period anti-Christian discourse’. Hori Isao and others have pointed out that while the ‘early period’ documents were primarily documents for public consumption that Razan wrote on behalf of other people, the documents of the 1650s were ostensibly private communications that he wrote openly on behalf of no one other than himself.8 However it is also important to note that while these later documents were

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ostensibly ‘private’ correspondence at the time of writing, a number of them were published by Razan’s son Gahō to a large readership in Hayashi Razan Bunshū in 1661. Therefore from at least this time, less than 10 years after their authorship, if not before, they had actually become public documents deployed in the political discourse space. The source documents considered to comprise Razan’s ‘late-period antiChristian discourse’ and examined in this chapter are Sōzoku zenki 草賊前 記 (1651), Sōzoku kōki 草賊後記 (1652), and certain letters from Razan’s correspondence with Ishikawa Jōzan 石川丈山 (1583–1672) written in 1651 and 1654, and contained in Hayashi Razan Bunshū. Sōzoku zenki and Sōzoku kōki are often considered as one document and called either Sōzoku zenkōki 草賊前 後記, or just Sōzoku ki, both in compilations and catalogues.9 Sōzoku zenkōki is clearly an account of, and Razan’s commentary on, two related rebellion plots exposed in 1651 and 1652. The texts focus particularly on political intrigues and rumours associated with the Keian Affair 慶安事変 of 1651. Razan’s comments in this text focus on the intellectual affiliations of the leaders of the rebellion. The letters to Ishikawa Jōzan similarly begin with discussion on matters relating to the Keian Affair, before moving on to questions of intellectual heterodoxy. The letters to Jōzan, having been compiled in Hayashi Razan Bunshū, a widely available text, have been well quoted and are commonly used in research on Tokugawa intellectual history (although seldom featured in writing on anti-Christian discourse). But there has been virtually no research at all in Japanese or any other language on Sōzoku zenkōki. Therefore, in this chapter we will firstly examine the letters, before moving on to deal with Sōzoku zenki, and then Sōzoku kōki.

The Ishikawa Jōzan letters: delineating heterodoxy, expanding sectarianism Some of the most important sources for Hayashi Razan’s views on both Christianity and Wang Yang-ming-ist Confucianism are articles of correspondence from the 1650s exchanged between Razan and his friend Ishikawa Jōzan. Hayashi Razan and Ishikawa Jōzan continued a more or less regular exchange of letters over a period of 37 years, from 1617 until 1654. Razan’s letters to Jōzan are collected in books six and seven of Hayashi Razan Bunshū. Considered one of the best sources of Razan’s criticism of not only Buddhism, but also Christianity and a range of Chinese intellectual traditions Razan did not hold with, the letters to Ishikawa Jōzan have been a favourite of Tokugawa intellectual history researchers for at least the past century and a half.10 Although the letters were originally private correspondence, they soon became part of the public domain when Razan’s son, Gahō, published them as part of Hayashi Razan Bunshū in 1661. Intellectual historians have in particular focused on two lengthy letters to Ishikawa Jōzan containing anti-Christian discourse, one written in 1651, and one written in 1654, which have been used repeatedly in histories and edited collections of source documents since the mid-nineteenth century.11

Attacking non-Christian ‘Christians’ 83 The anti-Christian content of the 1651 and 1654 letters has been commonly linked to the anti-Buddhist outlook of the correspondence as a whole. Hori Isao has gone so far as to suggest that the anti-Christian arguments emerged in the correspondence, ‘because they [Razan and Jōzan] had been able to freely express their private opinions against Buddhism’.12 There was, however, a much more immediate and obvious reason lying behind the introduction of anti-Christian discourse into this correspondence in 1651: the so-called Keian Affair, also known as the ‘Yui Shōsetsu Rebellion’. In 1651 (Keian year four), a plot formulated by a number of master-less samurai (rōnin) 牢人,13 the noted ‘military thought’14 teacher Yui Shōsetsu 由比正雪 (1605?–51) chief among them, was uncovered by officers of the Tokugawa shogunate. The planned rebellion was suppressed before it got under way. All parties to the plot were either killed or committed suicide. The so-called ‘Jōō Incident’ 承応事件 of the following year, another plot involving master-less samurai, was also viewed at the time as a rebel plot influenced by military thought. Although the Keian Affair is consistently referred to as a ‘rebellion plot’, it is fairly clear that what Shōsetsu was planning was something more than just a rebellion or isolated uprising: his objectives appear to have been much more clearly defined and ambitious than those of other insurrections of this period. For instance, the Shimabara Rebellion of thirteen years earlier and the occasional peasant uprisings were regionally based affairs, usually brought on by regional pressures and problems and typically carried out primarily by poorly armed and poorly trained peasants. Shōsetsu’s plan, however, was to seize key political and economic resources throughout the country in coordinated simultaneous attacks that would catch the government unawares and in a very short time force a handover of central government power. The attacks were planned to simultaneously hit targets in the shogunate’s military heartlands in Shizuoka and on the Kantō plain, and in other main centres in the Kansai.15 In terms of both its objectives and planning, the Keian plot was potentially a much more direct threat to the shogunate than the Shimabara Rebellion ever had been. Unlike Shimabara, which was a regional conflict in a particularly remote region, where the enemy were predominantly peasants, the Keian plot threatened to strike in the centre, and at the very heart of the Tokugawa power base, using well-trained samurai troops.16 Over the 34 years of correspondence between Jōzan and Razan, until 1651 there is no mention of Christianity. But the revelation of Yūi Shōsetsu’s plot was so shocking that it could not but dominate the correspondence of 1651. Razan’s first use of the word yaso (Christian) in correspondence with Jōzan is in the following context: Recently this gang of villains, all followers of that scum [Yūi Shōsetsu], secretly swore an oath to light the flame of rebellion and plunder. When they tried it on, every one of them ended up slaughtered and strung up, or else committed suicide. … Most of these scum were enamored with his heterodox learning, and listened to his evil teachings, or else they were students of

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Attacking non-Christian ‘Christians’ strategy or weapons. They have mutated into something in place of the Christians.17

A close examination of the whole of the argument in this 1651 letter, however, reveals quite clearly that the primary object of criticism is not Christianity, but rather Japanese military thought. The damage of heterodoxy, the degradation of military thought, is steadily becoming worse and worse. We really must lament this sad state of affairs.18 The argument of the letter centres on criticism of military thought. Razan begins by outlining the history of ‘military thought in Japan’, before criticizing the condition of the tradition in the current day. Razan laments that the thought of Sunzi, after being imported to Japan from China, endured a long process of degradation, which led ultimately to the current situation where the transmission of that tradition in Japan could no longer be trusted. Their Way has been torn asunder, their rites are already disordered. Now in recent times they have caused confusion among the mindless masses by freely making up texts and strategies to please themselves.19 Razan was particularly suspicious of contemporary military thought texts, and ones that had been ‘translated’ from the original Chinese into Japanese. But a much more specific problem he had with the military-thought tradition of his day as he saw it was the presence of ‘superstition’ and ‘magic’. Moreover, they outrageously claim that their learning possesses magical powers, and that they can defeat an army of men without fighting. Again, it’s laughable.20 In this letter of 1651, the sole reference to Christianity is that quoted above. But many images commonly associated with Christianity in Japan at that time are deployed in the text, not to criticize Christianity, but to criticize the military thought heterodoxy – the main object of Razan’s attack. He alleges that the tradition he is criticizing is superstitious, spiritual, given to rebellion against authority, and uses texts from a tradition that cannot be trusted in an incredible rendition of Japanese. All these are criticisms associated with the Christian tradition. After 34 years of the word ‘Christian’ not being used in the correspondence, it is also interesting to note exactly how that word is used. Clearly speaking about the ‘heterodoxy’ of ‘military thought’, Razan labels it as ‘mutated into something in place of the Christians’. As we will see later in this chapter, nearly all the references to Christianity in Razan’s so-called ‘later-period anti-Christian discourse’ label another intellectual tradition as ‘a mutation of Christianity’ or ‘a mutant doctrine of the Christians’.21 In this 1651 letter, therefore, Razan’s use of

Attacking non-Christian ‘Christians’ 85 anti-Christian discourse is clearly a rhetorical element in an attack on the militarythought tradition. Let us next turn to the 1654 letter. Although in most research to date there is no mention at all of the 1651 letter examined above, the 1654 letter is quoted prolifically in all manner of research monographs dealing with a range of aspects of Tokugawa-period Japanese history, usually to demonstrate Hayashi Razan’s ‘antiChristian’ outlook. This is probably because in this later letter Razan expresses himself much more emphatically and in more colourful language. As Hori Isao has pointed out, in the 1654 letter Razan, ‘judges any heterodoxy outside of Zhu Xiism as a heresy, a mutated doctrine of Christianity’.22 In this letter Razan criticizes Buddhism, Daoism and military thought, but he particularly focuses his attack on Wang Yang-ming-ist Confucianism. Because of this particular focus of attack, the following section of the letter, which alludes to a linkage between Christianity and Wang Yang-ming-ist Confucianism, is often quoted in research on the Japanese Confucians Nakae Tōju and Kumazawa Banzan, who were associated with that school. Also, it has stolen [the teachings of] Wang Yang-ming. It is not Confucian, it is not Daoist, it is not Buddhist, call it the three-legged cat-demon. … It is what harms people, it is heterodoxy. … Ah, a mutation of Christianity, this is what it has come to!23 Quoting an extracted passage of the text like this, it might appear that Razan’s position on Christianity in this letter is simply to attack it, with a linkage to Wang Yang-ming-ist Confucianism. But looking at the whole of the letter, it is apparent that Razan develops his argument more systematically than that. He opens this part of the argument by referring to Christianity. Christianity mutates, and becomes heterodoxy, like a monster who eats a girl and then transforms into the form of a girl. It should be feared.24 But he then goes on to blame the advent of Christianity and heterodoxies in Japan on the introduction of Buddhism. Our realm of the gods [Shinto nation] has already been turned into a land of the Buddhas [Buddhist nation]. Ah, do gods look like things which are not gods? All people fear death. So they [the Buddhists] use [the idea of] the afterlife to entice the people into their deception.25 In this way, he blames the spread of Christianity on the introduction of ideas of afterlife and salvation through the introduction to Japan of Buddhism. He then goes on to point out the corruption of the Buddhist clergy, and to allege that this gave the Christians a point at which to strike in Japanese society. Razan’s discussion, leading ultimately to the famous phrase ‘mutation of Christianity’, thereby begins with a discussion of Buddhism, emphasizing Buddhism’s important

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role in Japanese society. But he is critical of that role, and of forcing Japanese to register as Buddhists, claiming that, ‘returning to Buddhism and then becoming Christian is all too easy’.26 Razan then moves on to other ‘heterodoxies’ through a discussion of the motivations of the Keian Affair rebels (or ‘bandits’ as he calls them). It is here that Razan lists, in order, not only Buddhism, but also the Tentō trend of Confucian thought, Daoist thought (or as he puts it ‘the thought of Laozi and Zhuangzi’), and Wang Yang-ming-ist Confucianism, alleging that all these traditions have been ‘stolen’. Because they have been ‘stolen’, Razan calls them ‘three-legged catdemons’ and then clearly defines what he means, saying ‘these are heterodoxies’. It is only then that the famous line, ‘ah, a mutation of Christianity, this is what it has come to’, appears.27 So Razan’s ‘late-period anti-Christian discourse’, as expressed in this 1654 letter to Jōzan, is not saying that Wang Yang-ming-ist Confucianism is a form of Christianity. Rather it is saying that ‘heterodoxy’ can easily be used (‘stolen’, or appropriated) by the likes of Christians, and that is why heterodoxy is bad and should be eradicated.28 To recap: the section of the letter touching on the Christian issue begins with a reference to the Keian Affair, then moves on to systematically link not only military thought but also Buddhism, Wang Yang-mingist Confucianism, and Daoism as ‘stolen’ traditions, which Razan compresses into the single category of ‘heterodoxy’. He then associates this with a monolithically constructed, easily recognizable, and universally repulsive image: ‘Christianity’. This is basically the crux of Razan’s so-called ‘late-period anti-Christian discourse’ in the Ishikawa Jōzan letters. As examined in the previous chapter, Christianity was portrayed by Razan in diplomatic documents of the 1620s and 1630s as a mysterious foreign creed that threatened to destabilize order. In the Ishikawa Jōzan letters of the 1650s, however, Razan portrays Christianity as something manifested in other intellectual traditions of the time. This latter discourse transfers the focal image of the ‘enemy’ from the ‘cat-eyed, long-nosed, red-haired, babbling barbarians’ (non-Japanese Christians) seen in those diplomatic texts29 to indigenous Japanese thinkers: militarists, Confucians, and others (all Japanese non-Christians), who were portrayed as hotbeds of rebellion and disorder. Besides the letters examined above, this discourse is also present in several other manuscript texts which until recently have not been well researched. One example is the alleged record of a Confucian–Buddhist debate where Razan represented the Confucians: Jubutsu mondō (A Confucian–Buddhist Dialogue). This text, as the title suggests, is not primarily to do with Christianity. It was, however, produced around the same period as Razan’s ‘late-period anti-Christian discourse’, and displays a similar use of Christianity to attack Buddhism. It seems that it [Buddhism] is so similar to Christianity because it comes from a neighboring country. As Hanfeizi said, Buddhism is nothing but just another barbarian creed. He was right.30

Attacking non-Christian ‘Christians’ 87 Here Razan emphasizes Buddhism’s foreign origins, referring to India and Europe as ‘neighbors’ as part of a tactic similar to that in the Jōzan letters – that of using the Christian image against another tradition. The best example of this kind of use of anti-Christian discourse, however, and also without doubt the most important of Razan’s unpublished manuscripts, is Sōzoku zenkōki.

Sōzoku zenkōki: record of rebellion The text most commonly referred to as Sōzoku zenkōki is made up of two texts which give Razan’s version of what happened in two incidents of insurrection in the mid-1650s. Sōzoku zenki, dated 1651, deals with the Keian Affair of the same year; Sōzoku kōki, dated 1652, deals with the Jōō Incident of that year. In Sōzoku zenkōki, the two incidents are ostensibly treated separately in separate documents or sections but are presented in very similar terms: both were caused by people labelled ‘bandits’; each arose from the study of ‘military thought’; both were related to ‘heterodoxy’ and ‘mutated Christianity’. In this manner, they are both located within the same political and intellectual milieu. The Jōō Incident, both in contemporary sources and in histories written today, is sometimes considered a completely separate incident from the Keian Affair, and is sometimes considered a partial continuation of it.31 Most discussion of these incidents, however, focuses on the political background to the Keian Affair, and narrates both incidents in terms of the political and intellectual trends associated with the former incident. As mentioned earlier, the Keian Affair was perceived at the time as a much more serious threat to Tokugawa power than other rebellions such as Shimabara, in many ways due to its geographical centrality and samurai class base. Perhaps the level at which the shogunate perceived this threat is one of the reasons why there are very few contemporary sources narrating the incident.32 The vast difference in the number of contemporary accounts available on the history of the Shimabara Rebellion and the Keian Affair is striking. Within the first twenty or thirty years after the Shimabara Rebellion a huge number of accounts were written. These amount to their own sub-genre of literature from this period, the so-called ran ki, or records of rebellion, almost all of which were written by samurai who fought on the shogunate side and regale the reader with tales of their conquest of the heretic peasant fanatics of Shimabara.33 As for contemporary accounts of the Keian Affair, however, there are virtually none. Most of the Tokugawa period sources that narrate the Keian Affair are political or literary texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.34 From the very limited number of contemporary sources on the Keian Affair, Sōzoku zenkōki is the only one that systematically attempts to explain the cause of the affair and motivations of the plotters.35 Despite this, there appears to have been virtually no serious research done on Sōzoku zenkōki, either in Japanese or any other language. One possible reason is that it has been printed in only one widely available text, Jijitsu bunpen.36 It is actually also available in a less well-known regionally printed text, volume five of the Tōkai bunko series published in Shizuoka.37 In both these printings, however,

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Attacking non-Christian ‘Christians’

a large and important section of the original text has been omitted. In the Jijitsu bunpen printing there is a mark to indicate where the text has been abridged, but in the Shizuoka text the abridgement is not marked. All research, including specialist research on the Keian Affair, uses the Jijitsu bunpen abridged text for references from Sōzoku zenkōki, not the complete manuscript.38 The references in secondary literature tend to amount to not much more than the quotation of one line or a footnote alluding to a criticism of Kumazawa Banzan, or reference to Christianity. I have found no research which returns to the manuscripts and looks at their overall, contextualized, argument. Before examining the argument, we must establish the text’s authenticity: was it actually written by Hayashi Razan in 1651 and 1652, as claimed? To establish authenticity it is first necessary to compare a range of the extant manuscripts. The Kokusho sōmokuroku 国書総目録 lists seven extant manuscripts of this text.39 I have viewed four of these