Description
Book SynopsisIn the aftermath of the religious crisis triggered by the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church set out to conquer faithful in new territories. The first missionaries to arrive in Japan were the Jesuits who were forced to adopt a different type of evangelization, with a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach. This volume shows that Japan turned out to be a land of experimentation and development of a global Catholicism, as well as an unprecedented laboratory of encounter between political, scientific and religious cultures in the age of the first globalization. It analyzes the different conversion strategies developed by the Jesuit fathers toward various groups, including samurai, Buddhist bonzes and Japanese peasants. A key step was the appropriation of sacred space by the missionaries: first in a violent way with the construction of large crosses and the destruction of temples, pagodas and pagan idols, then through strategies more flexible and accommodating of replacing p
Table of Contents
Introduction
I. Preaching a foreign God
1. Missionary violence
2. Christ’s samurai
3. From persecutions to martyrdom
II. Planting Crosses
1. The conquest of sacred space
2. Symbol of a suffering God
III. The Miraculous Tree
1. The cross in the trunk
2. Christianizing ancient cults
IV. The Wood of Martyrdom
1. Crosses of blood
2. The Japanese Roses of Nagasaki
V. The Pope’s Samurai: Takayama Ukon
1. A martyr without martyrdom
2. The postmortem career: from failures to the altars
