Sacred Space and Ritual in Early Modern Japan: The Christian Community of Nagasaki (1569-1643)

要旨

community. 2 This is why, in order to address my research question, I analyse the involvement of the Nagasaki citizens in the production, maintenance and transformations of sacred spaces.In order to explore the creation and evolution of Christian spaces in Nagasaki, this thesis takes an historical approach, building on the previous work on Christianity in early modern Japan and on Nagasaki city.Rather than a new periodization of the so-called Christian Century, 3 I propose an historical narrative organized in terms of spaces and the actions that produced them, distinguishing among three main actions: the entry of Christianity into the Japanese public sphere, its later expulsion from Japan, and finally its withdrawal into a private, secret sphere.These actions produced different kinds of places where the missionaries and the Christian and non-Christian Japanese interacted.To introduce Christianity to Japanese society, missionaries constructed residences, churches, hospitals and schools in villages and towns, interacting with the Japanese.The prohibition of Christianity by the Japanese authorities involved not only the desacralization, dismantling, and appropriation of all Christian spaces, but also the production of Buddhist temples and civil authorities' buildings in their stead.Other new spaces were also produced, such as prisons, torture sites and execution grounds for Christians.The Japanese Christians reacted to and resisted the prohibition by turning the execution grounds into martyrdom sites through worship, and by producing new private Christian spaces both within their households and in secret communal spaces like caves and Christian cemeteries.Moreover, the 'hidden Christian communities' exerted a passive resistance to the prohibition by refusing to engage in the construction process of public spaces, such as Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, which the Tokugawa government fostered as a way to counter Christianity.To presuppose a strict chronological order on these three main actions and their corresponding spatial processes would be simplistic.Although the building of churches can be clearly delimited in time, since no Christian churches were built

主題