HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR Japan’s 18th-Century Pioneer of Historical Consciousness By Cassandra Farrin Martin Scorsese recently released a film adaptation of the 1966 novel Silence by Shusaku Endo that traces the persecution of Christians in 17th-century Japan. As a long-time admirer and friend of the Japanese people, I am understandably nervous about how this new film will affect Western perceptions of a country I hold dear, so I looked into the history of religious persecution in Japan to help put the film in context. Ironically, the best book I found on the subject wasn’t on Christianity at all, but on Buddhism: Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution by James Edward Ketelaar. First, a little perspective: when Christian missionaries attempted to penetrate Japan in the 17th century, they were met by a military government with a strict isolationist policy. Criminal activities of all kinds, religious or not, warranted extreme and often gruesomely creative punishments. Torture was viewed as a legitimate way to extract a confession. In this waning era of the samurai, an excruciating death was not the special purview of a Christian martyr. It wasn’t even the purview of the poor. Although often romanticized, samurai culture did foster a certain poeticism of death: a nobleman condemned to death often wrote a poem to commemorate the occasion and then died by self-disembowelment followed by beheading. Was the violence employed in Christian persecution dreadful? Yes. Was it exceptional? Probably not. By the time Buddhism became the target of persecution in the 19th century, Japan was engaged in what must surely be one of the most miraculous and yet disturbing transformations of any country in the world. They were not colonized by an outside power; they became a colonizing power—and they did it in a political and social revolution that took less than a century. Fortunately for Buddhists, criminal justice reform was a high priority because poor treatment of prisoners might be used as an excuse for invasion by foreign powers. The raw violence of the 17th century was replaced by modern prisons and government bureaucracy, although local government officials were not above such petty actions as beheading statues of the Buddha as “heretics.” Nevertheless, the persecution was thorough and intense: at least 40,000 temples were closed, the priests forcibly laicized. The commonplace practice of male-male sexuality among priests became a source of ridicule and embarrassment, even though it had been legally protected up to this period. Precious temple artifacts were melted into cannons for national defense. Buddhism was systematically separated from political processes. Riots broke out in protest across Japan in the 1870s, but Buddhism’s loss of public presence and power was posed as necessary for the sake of the survival of the country. To my great surprise, Ketelaar explained that both the intense persecution of Buddhists in 19th-century Japan and the parallel reformation of the movement into a uniquely Japanese “new Buddhism” relied on the work of the 18th-century Japanese scholar Tominaga Nakamoto (1715–1746). That’s because Tominaga wrote a powerful critique of historical consciousness in Buddhist sacred writings. He called it the Shutsujou kougo—or as he once said, “the Bible of this world.” The double-entendre is intentional: it could also be said he was offering his readers a “this-worldly Bible.” Tominaga was a gifted thinker whose careful interpretation of Buddhist texts, sifting the older layers of tradition from the more recent additions, hold their own even today alongside more recent scholarship. He was the first Japanese scholar ever to attempt such work, one hundred years before David Friedrich Strauss revolutionized and scandalized the Christian world with his publication of The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined. Like Strauss, Tominaga was ostracized. Many of his works were likely destroyed. The Shutsujou kougo probably only survived because it was convenient to the next generation in the fight over the future of Buddhism. In the words of Katou Shuuichi, Tominaga “might have become another Voltaire had he lived much longer and had Eighteenth Century Japan not been isolated from the outside world and on the eve of its revolution. In fact, he died too young [of a long illness] even to bring his ideas to fruition” (179). He wrote his first major work at the age of 15. He died at 31. Tominaga was troubled by the way “historical objects were mechanistically ‘built up’ (kajou) like so many layers of lacquer.” By historical objects, he meant traditions, cultures, and even peoples. He lampooned not only Mahayana Buddhism but also Confucianism and Shinto for depending on “habits alone” to determine the importance of an act. Although he appreciated Zen Buddhism’s resistance to this, he could also observe examples of how Zen, too, had failed in this regard. What really bothered him was each tradition’s attempt at “self extension” through becoming even more absolute than earlier traditions. Too often, he pointed out, a text touted its own perfection: “The profundity! The profundity! There is no sutra that can surpass this one.” “The Buddhas of the Ten Directions eternally meditate on this sutra.” Yet—and this is the part later persecutors of Buddhism would conveniently ignore when they cherry-picked from his work—he believed most of the sacred writings he read were struggles to resolve problems with an aim toward the Good. They all hit up against the same limitation: human language is too malleable to make absolute statements. We can avoid dogmatic thinking by observing Tominaga’s Three Things (san butsu): that particular words are spoken by a particular person at a particular historical moment. When Bishop Spong delivered his 12 Theses for a New Reformation, he framed them as negative critiques: these are the things we cannot accept. As his friend and colleague in the Jesus Seminar (now the Westar Institute), I feel a strong obligation to ask the next question, to take the next step. What is our positive task? What are we living for? Sometimes I feel paralyzed because I hear so much criticism of this or that seemingly innocuous action for being hateful to others, for leading to harm, that I think, “It must be impossible to take a single step without hurting someone.” This was more or less Tominaga’s concern at base, too: everything we attempt to make sacred is contingent. It may even be turned against us like a knife. Tominaga wanted to be, in the words of Ketelaar, “a disciple of the Good, as it was revealed in the heart of everyday life, expunged of dogmatic formulations that serve only to produce an endless series of unresolvable conflicts.” In this historic 500th anniversary year of the Protestant Reformation, I would like to operate in Tominaga’s spirit of being “a disciple of the Good.” Perhaps we can take heart in the fact that when Buddhism was under its most intense persecution in Japan, at the moment when Japanese Buddhists were wondering—as we are wondering today about Christianity—whether their tradition could survive dramatic social change, Tominaga’s call for self-critical reflection served as a rallying cry for reformers who did succeed in rescuing Buddhism from the brands of “heretic” and “barbarism” and established a new role for their tradition in a radically different world. ~Cassandra Farrin Read Online Here Bibliography Ketelaar, James Edward. Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. See Chapter 1, esp. pp. 20–28. Plugfielder, Gregory M. Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. Sato, Hiroaki. Legends of the Samurai. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 1995. Shuuichi, Katou. “Tominaga Nakamoto, 1715 – 46. A Tokugawa Iconoclast.” Monumenta Nipponica 22,1/2 (1967) 177–93. About the Author Cassandra Farrin is the marketing director of the Westar Institute and the editor of Polebridge Press. Her poetic retelling of the Nag Hammadi text On the Origin of the World is forthcoming in Gender Violence, Rape Culture, and Religion (Palgrave Macmillan). A US-UK Fulbright Scholar with more than ten years’ experience with cross-cultural and interfaith engagement, she has an M.A. in Religious Studies from Lancaster University (England) and a B.A. in Religious Studies from Willamette University. Question & Answer Mary from Oklahoma, writes: Question: Have you ever been scared? When people criticize your ideas, how do you remain courageous enough to keep your faith? Answer: By Eric Alexander Thanks for your question Mary! Early in my life I was pretty bold in sharing my ideas. Then as I got older and into high school and college, I found that it was much easier to be accepted by the tribe if my ideas were in harmony with theirs. I greatly regret falling into that trap, and I spent the better part of a decade trying to fit in and be who everyone else expected me to be. It was miserable to be honest. When I hit my late 20’s it was as if a fire alarm went off in my soul. I went to theology school and realized that the more I buried my truth, the more unhappy I became. Conforming to the tribe just made me sad and anxious, and it eventually came to a head. I made a commitment to myself of authenticity. So absolutely I have been scared, I still am sometimes. But now in hindsight I know that burying my ideas and hiding who I am ultimately just makes me more miserable. We just have to be true to our own spirits in this short and fleeting life we are given. So it’s ultimately pretty easy now to keep my faith, because I have experience to know that living by faithfulness is much healthier, even if in certain moments it is experienced as pure dread. ~Eric Alexander Read and Share Online Here About the Author Eric Alexander is an author, speaker, and activist. He is a board member at ProgressiveChristianity.org, and is the founder of Jesism, Christian Evolution, and the Progressive Christianity and Politics group on Facebook. Eric holds a Master of Theology from Saint Leo University and studied negotiations at Harvard Law School, and authored the popular children's emotional health book Teaching Kids Life IS Good. Announcements Click here for registration and more information.