Captain Jorge Álvares and Father Luís Fróis S.J.: Two Early Portuguese Descriptions of Japan and the Japanese

Abstract

The dialogism of the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), that is, the study of cultural interaction and the acknowledgment of the value or at least of the objective existence of other cultures, corresponds to one of the most significant aspects of Renaissance Humanism.1 In his turn, the Franco-Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov (born 1939) has stressed the Humanists’ quest for “cultural relativism”, as exemplified by Amerigo Vespucci, who sought to evaluate the arrival of Europeans from the standpoint of American Indians, in total contrast to the monological approach of Christopher Columbus.2 The emphasis was on a two-way process. Similar attitudes to those of Vespucci can be found in Thomas More's Utopia, in Michel de Montaigne's celebrated essay on the cannibals he encountered in Rouen, and in the Fides, religio moresque aethiopum of Damião de Góis (to mention but three prominent cases). Finally, it was the Palestinian-American literary theorist and cultural critic Edward Said (1935–2003) who throughout Orientalism (New York, 1978) propounded the widely accepted (though often hotly debated) theory that westerners’ analyses of eastern cultures were (and are) predominantly condescending, racist and imperialistic.