Tokugawa Sectarianism and Modern Ideology:
A New History of Japanese anti-Christian discourse
Kiri Paramore
Anti-Christian discourse constituted an important trend within mainstream political thought at several key points in Japanese modern and early-modern history. Most research to date, however, has not focussed on the domestic political context to the production of this discourse. Rather, it has presented Japanese anti-Christian discourse in terms of the history of Christianity in Japan, as a reaction to Christian thought. Such research often interacts with fashionable, yet simplistic dichotomies of “East-West cultural interaction”, or “clash of cultures” theories to present anti-Christian discourse in an academic milieu where intellectual and political conflict is inevitably explained in terms of cultural difference. This book rejects these approaches, arguing that anti-Christian discourse was constructed primarily not as a reaction to Christianity, but as a rhetorical device for use against non-Christian opponents in domestic political controversies. It should thereby rather be explained in terms of a historic development of sectarian political thought inside Japan which predates and occurs independently of the influxes of Christian influence in the late sixteenth and late nineteenth centuries. Such an approach places this study of anti-Christian discourse firmly in the context of the development of political thought in Japan. Analysis of anti-Christian discourse in this context allows us to demonstrate the concrete links between various historical anti-Christian discourses as they arose both during the construction of Tokugawa governance structures in the early seventeenth century, and in the construction of modern ideology in the late nineteenth early twentieth.
Through focussing on both the original anti-Christian discourse of the seventeenth century, and on the political utilization of anti-Christian discourse in the modern period, the book concretely demonstrates the manner by which early Tokugawa intellectual constructs were deployed in modern Japanese ideology construction. Current research identifies modern Japanese ideology’s roots in the late Tokugawa period. Seventeenth century Japanese political thought tends to be studied in isolation, as part of the story of the establishment of the Tokugawa regime, but not in terms of its direct influence on modern Japan. Previous research specializing on the anti-Christian discourse of the seventeenth century similarly treats it in isolation, not illustrating how it was integrated into later intellectual paradigms. This book challenges these historical outlooks by concretely demonstrating both how early Tokugawa period intellectual constructs were used in modern ideology, and how in the early Tokugawa period itself these same intellectual constructs had already been put to ideological use in similar highly charged political contexts.
Much of the book thereby concentrates on a reconstruction of early Tokugawa thought which demonstrates a range of political functions this discourse played. By acknowledging the diverse and politically integrated nature of both Christian and anti-Christian thought in the early-Tokugawa period, this book succeeds in explaining the motivations and outcomes of the texts which constitute this thought in terms of historically verifiable socio-political contexts, rather than the sort of ephemeral culturalist generalizations which have hitherto dominated studies of it. This explanation is delivered through analysis of a range of sources, many of them never researched before. This analysis is developed from source research which has been defended in top-line Japanese academic forums like the Association for the Study of Japanese Intellectual History, and acknowledged by the publication of papers in this association’s journals, and through the award of a PhD from the University of Tokyo.
The obvious achievement of this book is its recasting of the history of anti-Christian discourse in Japan in a new paradigm showing its influence on modern thought and politics. Another important significance of this book, however, lies in its demonstration of direct links between the development of modern ideology, and the construction of political thought in the early Tokugawa period. By showing a continuity through the development of ideological political thought in Japan from at least the early seventeenth century through to the modern period, this book suggests a crucial reform of the picture of the development of political thought in Japan which has held since the 1960s and 70s alterations to the Maruyama history of Japanese political thought.
