The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (5 page)

Thus, while the notion of Europe or European remain to this day contested, it is understandable that Frois spoke of European rather than Portuguese customs.

The
Tratado
and the governance of souls

The
Tratado
and Valignano's twin initiatives of embracing Japanese customs and creating a Japanese clergy can be seen as significant departures from European colonialism in as much as they seem to imply a respect for and even the empowerment of a Japanese other.
⁸⁹
In this regard, scholars long have acknowledged the impressive ethnographic and linguistic literature produced by Jesuit missionaries during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Jesuit grammars and
artes
of non-Western languages such as Japanese, Guaraní, or Cahita continue to be valued by linguists.
⁹⁰
Similarly, anthropologists, literary scholars, and historians have marveled at the “proto-ethnographies” of non-Western peoples compiled by the likes of Blas Valera, Pérez de Ribas, Paul LeJeune, or Mateo Ricci.
⁹¹
Significantly, the Jesuits “walked the talk” of cultural relativism, for instance, supplying their Guaraní neophytes in Paraguay with firearms so they could resist Luso-Brazilian slave raiders (“Paulistas”).
⁹²
In northern Mexico, the black robes often blocked Spanish miners from exploiting Indian labor. And in Japan, as we have seen, the Jesuits led by Valignano made plans to
create a Catholic Church that was staffed from the top down (bishops, clerics, and religious) by the Japanese themselves.
⁹³

The Jesuits' “progressive” missions and texts often have been explained in terms of the Jesuit embrace of Renaissance Humanism and Thomism, which predisposed the Jesuits to see potentially virtuous pagans where others saw irredeemable savages.
⁹⁴
Jesuits were indeed thoroughly convinced (it was at the heart of their own religious election) that God's grace was ubiquitous. Jesuits disembarking in Japan, China, or the Americas expected to find societies with serious flaws because these societies never had benefited from revealed truth (i.e. Gospels) and the sacraments. But the same Jesuits understood that God never would have abandoned his creation. Through the simple application of reason to the majesty of creation (as per Thomas Aquinas), many Indians or Asians were likely to arrive at some knowledge of and reverence for the one, true God.
⁹⁵
Jesuits, in fact, were open to the possibility that pagans got quite a few things right, so to speak.
⁹⁶

While it is true that the Society of Jesus was nourished by a revival of Thomism and the flowering of humanism, the half-century prior to 1540 also was an age of discovery that provided unprecedented European access to distant worlds that abounded in fabulous riches. The riches were difficult to secure, however, in the absence of European juridical control. As Valignano himself pointed out, neither Spain nor Portugal ever were in a position to successfully invade Japan and China and overpower the indigenous elite, installing European institutions and authority. It was much easier to transplant European juridical control (e.g. the
audiencia
, the
presidio
, bishoprics) in the New World, where the arrival of Europeans was coincident with epidemics that devastated the Indian population, killing countless elders and thus undermining indigenous authority.
⁹⁷
As noted, the arrival of Europeans in China and Japan did not precipitate a population collapse resulting from the introduction of infectious diseases.
⁹⁸

In Asia as well as frontier areas of Latin America, the inextricable Christian imperatives of commodity and spiritual conversion
⁹⁹
required an “indirect” means
of gaining access to and control of the indigenous population. Arguably, the Jesuit mission met this requirement by operationalizing what Foucault has referred to as “governmentality.” In a series of lectures toward the end of his life, Foucault observed that, beginning in the sixteenth century, the exercise of power in Europe increasingly came to be based on disciplinary rather than juridical authority.
¹⁰⁰
Whereas polities during the Middle Ages were maintained by threat of force,
¹⁰¹
increasingly during the early modern period they came to rely on a complex arrangement of various “technologies of the self,” which simultaneously championed freedom, all the while “free” human beings were busy disciplining themselves in accordance with socially-constructed truths about their identities. The sixteenth century witnessed the publication of books that mapped out in great detail “appropriate” beliefs, practice, and identities:
The Perfect Wife
(1585),
The Book of the Courtier
(c. 1521),
The Education of a Christian Woman
(1523),
The Prince
(1505),
On Civility in Boys
(1530). What Greenblatt
¹⁰²
has termed “Renaissance self-fashioning” was effected through a host of new and old disciplines (e.g. the theater) that provided Europeans from all walks of life with the opportunity to model their social performance after the roles delimited in texts, sermons, on stage, or in the visual arts.
¹⁰³

Interestingly, it is around the middle of the sixteenth century, when Foucault notes there is a huge outpouring of reflection and publication on the government of oneself, of one's soul, of children, and of the state,
¹⁰⁴
that the Society of Jesus was founded by Ignatius Loyola. The new religious order alientated many contemporaries (i.e. Mendicants, secular clergy) precisely because it broke with the juridical or cenobitic model of religious life
¹⁰⁵
and flaunted what was a new technology of the self that balanced religious freedom with Christian zeal. The Jesuits ignored “purity of blood,” admitting
conversos
; they wore no distinctive garb; they were not permanently assigned to religious houses; they did not recite the divine office as a community; Jesuit superiors were obeyed, but not in defiance of one's conscience. All this “freedom” was held in check by what Foucault termed techniques of disciplinary power such as yearly performance of the Spiritual Exercises (a well-defined
religious retreat involving a general confession), regular letter writing between Jesuits, and the circulation and consumption
¹⁰⁶
of a public discourse (e.g. the
anuas
or “Jesuit Relations”) that celebrated the Jesuit “way of proceeding.”

Although the Jesuits frightened many traditional Catholics (not to mention contemporary “heretics” or Protestants), the order very quickly gained the favor of the Portuguese and Spanish Crowns and the Papacy, particularly because of its successful mission enterprises in Asia and subsequently America. As Bernard Cohn,
¹⁰⁷
among others, has pointed out, successful colonial ventures presuppose “cultural technologies of rule” that classify and naturalize indigenous subjects. In this regard, the Jesuits mastered indigenous languages and drafted impressive “proto-ethnographies” of indigenous peoples not because they were intent on celebrating difference or desired reciprocal understanding, but because systematically mapping difference facilitated the Jesuits' unidirectional program for directed culture change.
¹⁰⁸
Knowledge of indigenous languages and customs was a prerequisite of operating within societies where the Jesuits were juridically powerless.
¹⁰⁹

Significantly, with knowledge of otherness the Jesuits proceeded to develop seminaries, boarding schools, and confraternities to transform (using, for example, Japanese and Latin editions of Western/Christian texts
¹¹⁰
) “good pagans” into true Christians. To quote one of Valignano's assistants, Duarte de Sande, “…it is necessary to enter with theirs to come out with ours.”
¹¹¹
Writing to Valignano from China in 1583, Mateo Ricci reported “…we have become Chinese so that we may gain the Chinese for Christ.”
¹¹²

The Jesuit mission to Japan, including Valignano's liberal re-structuring of the enterprise appears entirely consistent with Foucault's characterization of “governmentality.
¹¹³
In Japan, as elsewhere, the Jesuits produced detailed studies of the Japanese language as well as an extensive “ethnographic” literature, including Frois' systematic comparison of European and Japanese customs. As suggested, the
Tratado
apparently was drafted to help explain Japanese customs to European Jesuits, with the further idea that this understanding would make it easier to embrace
certain
customs. Note, however, that neither Frois nor Valignano (nor anybody else at the time) anticipated the modern anthropological understanding of culture as an integrated system of behaviors and beliefs—this despite the
Tratado's
systematic survey of customs (e.g., chapters on gender, architecture, plays, writing, warfare, etc.). Like Montaigne, Valignano and Frois may have suspected or intuited that customs were interrelated
¹¹⁴
—that a society's cuisine or architecture might be integrally related to its religious beliefs and practices. Nevertheless, neither Valignano nor Frois seemed concerned that European Jesuits who “lived like the Japanese” (i.e. following many of their customs) might become “destabilized,” assimilating if not valuing, for instance, Buddhist and Shinto values and beliefs.
¹¹⁵
In keeping with Jesuit first principles as articulated by Loyola,
¹¹⁶
Valignano and Frois believed that European as well as Japanese Jesuits were “formed” and steeled in a significant way (an essential identity) by the operation of the Holy Spirit and the embrace of a fundamental set of Christian/Jesuit beliefs and practices.
¹¹⁷
This understanding was entirely in keeping with the Jesuit “way of proceeding,” which assumed that a Jesuit who remained connected to god and fellow Jesuits was free to follow their conscience and be adaptable with respect to externals (e.g., wear whatever is appropriate; pray when possible; help the poor or befriend a king).

Although the Jesuits principally were concerned with re-making their converts, they nevertheless went further than many of their European contemporaries in understanding and respecting difference. As Foucault pointed out, “governmentality”—regimes of diffuse power where people essentially
discipline themselves—nevertheless entails a freedom to explore and embrace alternative behaviors and beliefs. Arguably, European Jesuits such as Frois, Organtino, and Rodrigues, who may have initially “performed” Japanese customs to access potential converts, discovered that the “performances” were satisfying and rewarding. In Japan and the Americas, the Jesuits did, in fact, accommodate indigenous traditions.
¹¹⁸
However, it must be kept in mind that the Jesuits never questioned their “mission from God,” which was fundamentally about altering Japanese identity—even when it meant destroying Japanese lives
¹¹⁹
If Valignano wanted fellow Jesuits to embrace Japanese customs, it was because he perceived this embrace of
certain
customs as largely inconsequential from the perspective of one's fundamental identity and “soul.”
¹²⁰
Correspondingly, Valignano was willing to create a Catholic Church staffed by the Japanese, but only on the condition that the Japanese, beginning in childhood, were “formed” with an essentially Western/Christian worldview, imparted by the study of Latin and the consumption of a select (e.g. no Erasmus or Lucretius), Humanist canon that came to include works as diverse as the lives of the saints, Aesop, and Cinderella, all of which were edited and translated into Japanese.
¹²¹
Again, these expressions of governmentality held the promise of rebellion—“there is no power without potential refusal or revolt”
¹²²
—as Japanese trained by the Jesuits could, upon assuming positions of power as priests, “fall back” on whatever Japanese traditions they may have secretly cherished or rediscovered in later life. An excellent example of such rebellion is Fukan Fabian (1565–1621). Fabian was a Japanese convert to Christianity who received training as a Jesuit “scholastic” and was destined for ordination as a priest. Rather late in his life (1608), Fabian apostatized, subsequently authoring
Ha Daiusu
(1620), a sophisticated theological critique of Christianity as the one true faith.
¹²³

In the case of Japan, we can only speculate about what might have been, had Valignano's plans for a Catholic Church been fully realized. Two years after Frois
drafted the
Tratado
the Jesuit enterprise in Japan started to unravel. Japanese
daimyo
, particularly the most powerful of these elites, seemingly became frightened by the Jesuits or what they represented. For reasons that are still debated by scholars,
¹²⁴
Japan's most powerful
daimyo
, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, became convinced in 1587 that the Jesuits posed a threat to his power and authority. Hideyoshi issued an order of expulsion, which while largely symbolic (only three Jesuits actually left Japan), marked the beginning of a tense decade that culminated in 1597 in the very public persecution of twenty Japanese Christians and six Franciscan friars. (The Franciscan order had come to Japan in 1593, over Jesuit objections.
¹²⁵
) Bickering and competition between the Catholic orders contributed further to fears among Japanese elites and led in 1614 to a new round of persecutions, expulsions, and the widespread destruction of Christian churches. Those Christians who survived went into hiding until 1637–38, when they joined a peasant uprising (the Shimbara rebellion) that was promptly crushed. Henceforth the Tokugawa regime effectively closed Japan to Christian missionaries and what remained of the Catholic Church went underground.
¹²⁶
As an aside, today less than 1 percent of all Japanese consider themselves Christian; the overwhelming majority identify with Shinto and Buddhism
¹²⁷