Découverte et méconnaissance du poisson fermenté: Le cas des dictionnaires jésuites du Japon

Abstract

It seems likely that the time has come for Latin and Greek studies to address the question of liquamina with reference to Asia. This article therefore aims to draw attention to the fact that in 1595, in the Amakusa dictionary, related Latin terms were actually translated in Japanese. The analysis of this initial confrontation sheds some light on a hitherto unseen aspect of the problem: liquamina, being filtered liquids, have to be by-products of something else, and to be valid, it is here that any comparison should begin. The Amakusa dictionary, on which the Portuguese and the Japanese collaborated, and sometimes opposed each other, betrays traces of the Japanese endeavour to discover familiar things, beyond the Latin terms. In the subsequent Nagasaki dictionary, fermented fish appears, amidst its vegetarian variants, as the very touchstone of Jesuit food acculturation, allowing us to grasp the cultural paradigm through which the Fathers understood otherness in the Japanese context, namely Greco-Latin Antiquity. This long-forgotten Jesuit understanding of fermented fish products leads us even deeper into the problem of representations associated with fish fermentation.