A Christian Samurai

Reviewed by: A Christian Samurai: The Trials of Baba Bunkō by William J. Farge Peter Nosco (bio) A Christian Samurai: The Trials of Baba Bunkō. By William J. Farge, SJ. Catholic University of America Press, Washington, 2016. xiv, 300 pages. $34.95, paper; $34.95, E-book. Christianity is making a comeback in Tokugawa Japan. The accepted view as articulated in 1991 by Jurgis Elisonas was: there were practically no Christians left in Japan by the 1660s. . . . Deprived of priests, cut off from the sources of their faith, their memories of its doctrines fading even as the Tokugawa era progressed, the “crypto-Christians” (kakure Kirishitan) of these isolated groups imperceptibly drifted from Catholicism into a syncretic folk creed tinctured with Buddhism and Shinto, the native Japanese religion. And yet the machinery of surveillance did not rest. . . . a fruitless search for Christians where none was to be found.1 Over the last decade, this common wisdom has been challenged by a number of first-rate scholars and even by Pope Francis. Obvious highlights of this scholarship on Tokugawa Christianity include Nam-lin Hur’s 2007 study of the role of anti-Christianity in Japan’s Buddhist parish (danka) system; Kiri Paramore’s 2009 survey and analysis of Tokugawa-era anti-Christian polemic; and Jan Leuchtenberger’s 2013 study of the long shadow cast by the Kirishitan memory in Tokugawa literature.2 What these works share relevant to the volume under review is the manner in which they shed light on something, that is, Christians, where, in Elisonas’s words, “none was to be found,” and they do so by studying the shadows cast by these otherwise invisible Christians and their creed. Stirring the pot and overturning centuries of Vatican perspective on the largely nonsacramental underground “church” in Japan, Pope Francis entered the fray in 2014 and again in 2015, commending Japanese Christians [End Page 191] for the fidelity with which they preserved their practice of Baptism, which served as the spiritual glue that bound their concealed communities together in the face of endless inquisition and oppression.3 More recently Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film Silence resurrected attention to Endō Shūsaku (d. 1996) and his 1966 historical novel Chinmoku on which the film is based, and which itself has been the subject of at least one collection of essays in English.4 I have also published scholarship challenging the traditional view on several grounds: the demonstrable fidelity with which prayers and liturgies were preserved by communities that learned these in Japanese instead of Latin; the incongruous “discovery” in 1805 of 5,200 Christians in four villages surrounding Amakusa, as well as multiple comparable “discoveries” in Urakami, Amakusa, and Osaka between 1790 and 1867; and the probability that the instruments of the state charged with the enforcement of penalties for the victimless crime of being Christian deliberately refrained from the execution of these typically model, tax-paying, attention-avoiding peasants.5 Enter Baba Bunkō (1718–59) and the provocative study by William J. Farge, SJ of this samurai with a sharply critical tongue and an uncannily intimate understanding of Catholic doctrine. Known in Japan principally as a minor literary figure assigned to the ambiguous gesaku (“frivolous”) genre, Bunkō is as important to our understanding of mid-eighteenth-century Japanese politics as his better-known contemporaries Yamagata Daini (1725–67) and Takenouchi Shikibu (1712–67). Farge’s study of him is in some ways the final piece in a puzzle that calls for a serious reconsideration of the place of Christianity—and Christians—in Tokugawa Japan. Farge argues that the bakufu’s effort to eradicate Christianity was a failure, as demonstrated by the pockets of Christianity that survived throughout the Tokugawa period and in all regions of Japan, and his focus is on Baba Bunkō, whom Farge styles “the only person in the Tokugawa period to have been executed specifically for his writings” (p. 12). Born Nakai Bun’emon, Bunkō was a samurai from Iyo on Shikoku. In 1751 he moved to Edo and was most fortunate to find a low-ranking position in the bakufu, which he resigned along with his samurai status after only a few months and for unknown reasons

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• The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 4. Early Modern Japan

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• Ideology and Christianity in Japan

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• The Experiences of Christians During the Underground Years and Thereafter

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