Asian Studies: "Spanish Accounts of Christian Martyrdom in Japan: Towards A Literary History" (Lecture)

In 1614, Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (r. 1603-1605, d. 1616), through his son Shogun Tokugawa Hidetada (r. 1605-1632), proscribed Christianity and ordered all foreign clergy out of Japan. Over 350 missionaries, local clergy, and influential Japanese Christians were expelled from the country. The suppression of Christians in Japan was widely publicized in Europe, New Spain, and the Philippines. Members of the regular clergy as well as some laypersons took it upon themselves to disseminate the stories of suffering of Catholic Christians as well as the heroic efforts of Catholic missionaries who toiled under duress. These stories were later re-appropriated and continued to circulate long after Catholic Christianity was all but extinct in Japan. Consequently, hundreds of works dealing in part or in whole with Christian martyrdom in Tokugawa Japan were published between the years 1598 and 1900. The presentation will provide a preliminary assessment of this unique literary body as well as of the contributions of the seventeenth-century Mexican historian Fray Baltasar de Medina to the devotion of the martyrs of Nagasaki.