Confucianism, Christianity, and Heterodoxy in Tokugawa Japan

Abstract

APAN'S contact with Christianity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is among the fields of premodern Japanese history most intensively re- searched overseas. At its best, this subject has occasioned fine scholarship and bravura writing. Kiri Paramore's addition to the literature is fresh, clearly written, intellectually lively, and challenging. Paramore brings the story forward, arguing that the anti-Christian polemics of the seventeenth century underlay the development of ideology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His work is marked by a perspective new, he claims, to this field in Western-language liter- ature. Here is a Westerner, himself immersed in Japanese historiographical prac- tice, writing from the point of view of Japanese history, but retaining a critical perspective towards the historiographical tradition and compilation of source material. Throughout Ideology and Christianity in Japan, moreover, Paramore exploits sources that, as he sees it, have lain unused or neglected. This revision- ist aspect of the book makes it stimulating. Nor does Paramore lack sophistica- tion in the Jesuit background. He appears well informed about Jesuit theology and the work of the Jesuit missionary to China Matteo Ricci (1552-1610). The book's ambitious reach, from early Tokugawa to Meiji and beyond, down to the emperor system ideology of the prewar period, will pose a challenge to review- ers. The present review concentrates on the earlier part of the narrative. It finds