Paper short abstract:

This paper will focus on shintō uke, religious certification by shintō shrines, in Okayama domain. Motives for implementing shintō uke, e.g., anti-Buddhist sentiments will be discussed, but also the question by which kind of concept of Shintō these measures were provoked will be considered.

Paper long abstract:

Shintō uke, religious certification by shintō shrines, was practiced for a rather brief period in the second half of the 17th century in Okayama domain. When discussing reasons for taking up shintō uke factors like anti-Buddhist sentiments, political rivalries and preconditions but also the spread of an understanding of Shintō as a separate religion have to be taken into account.

In the middle of the 16th century the Edo bakufu intensified its measures of religious control of the population and most temples turned into quasi-governmental institutions through tera uke, the system of certification by Buddhist temples.

A couple of daimyō, however, took in the 1660ies a critical stance against Buddhism and digressed from the prescribed pattern of tera uke. They could not ignore the bakufus orders, but the daimyō of Aizu, Mito and Okayama domains did choose an alternative. They had religious control conducted by shintō shrines, a phenomenon in scholarly literature now generally termed shintō uke, shintō certification.

Foremost among them was Ikeda Mitsumasa (1609-1682), the daimyo of Okayama domain, who in less then a decade changed the religious landscape of his domain completely by shintō uke measures. In this context anti-Buddhist phenomena can be observed, such as an institutional separation of temples and shrines or forced laicization and even the closure of Buddhist temples. Towards the late 17th century, Okayama, Aizu and Mito finally had to comply with the bakufus requests and tera uke became standard even in these domains.

Shintō uke promises insights for a number of discourses on Japanese religions in the early modern period. Although scholars like Kuroda Toshio have argued for the non-existence of shintō as a separate religion prior to the Meiji period, shintō uke is indicative of an emerging opposition between Buddhism and Shintō, regardless of how the second term was actually understood. It touches on topics like orthodoxy (正) and heresy (邪), a new conception of Shintō, and may have served as a precursor or precedent of the religious politics in the early Meiji period.

Paper short abstract:

My aim is to analyze the emergence of a narrative of providential features and legitimization purposes in the midst of the Jesuit province of Japan that dealt on the outcome of Tokugawa's persecutions of Christianity in Japan from the early 1630s to 1650.

Paper long abstract:

During the rule of Tokugawa Iemitsu the Jesuits still present in Japan experienced an aggravation of the conditions under which they provided spiritual assistance to Japanese Christians. It became increasingly difficult to rely on Japanese Christians' networks for the support of the Jesuits living in secrecy on the islands, as well as on the financial backing from the Portuguese merchants of Macao that came to Nagasaki every year. When it became clear that the Society of Jesus couldn't provide a response that was able to meet the challenges of Japanese persecutions (prison, torture, death, and even apostasy of the missionaries) and that it wouldn't be able to renew the presence of its members on the islands, Jesuits from the province of Japan devised a narrative of self-legitimacy aimed at promoting the expectancy of a general turn of events, while at the same time reinforcing the special ties that linked the Society to the conversion of the archipelago.

Drawing from topoi of Biblical texts and historical models of Ancient Christianity, these Jesuits generated a series of accounts that pointed to the providential delivery of Japanese Christians and the Restoration of its Church, on the one hand, and to the role that the Society of Jesus would play in that event (either through the intercession of Jesuit saints, such as Francis Xavier and Ignatius of Loyola, or through the agency of its missionaries), on the other hand. In this paper, my aim is to analyze the several Jesuit accounts of martyrdom and of divine intervention concerning the missionaries of Japan (such as Sebastião Vieira, Marcello Mastrilli, Mateo Cebrián) and to outline the shifting strategies through which the Jesuits tried to accommodate several unrelated events in an underlying narrative of the redemption of the Church of Japan.