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The Dilemma of Faith in Modern Japanese Literature
iThe first book-length study to explore the links between Christianity and modern Japanese literature, this book analyzes the process of conversion of nine canonical authors, unveiling the influence that Christianity had on their self-construction, their oeuvre and, ultimately, the trajectory of modern Japanese literature.
Building significantly on previous research, which has treated the intersections of Christianity with the Japanese literary world in only a cursory fashion, this book emphasizes the need to make a clear distinction between the different roles played by Catholicism and Protestantism. In particular, it argues that most Meiji and Taishō intellectuals were exposed to an exclusively Protestant and mainly Calvinist derivation of Christianity and so it is against this worldview that the connections between the two ought to be assessed. Examining the work of authors such as Kitamura Tōkoku, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Nagayo Yoshirō, this book also contextualizes the spread of Christianity in Japan and challenges the notion that Christian thought was in conflict with mainstream literary schools. As such, this book explains how the dualities experienced by many modern writers were in fact the manifestation of manifold developments that placed Christianity at the center, rather than at the periphery, of their process of self-construction.
The Dilemma of Faith in Modern Japanese Literature will be of great interest to students and scholars of Japanese modern literature, as well as those interested in Religious Studies and Japanese Studies more generally.
eBook
Christ in Japanese Culture
Shedding light on a wide range of cross-cultural concerns and encounters, going far beyond narrow theological specialisation, the author argues that any successful process of missiological inculturation demands a serious antholopological consideration of indigenous faith.
eBook
Handbook of Japanese Christian Writers
Although a century and a half of Christian proselytizing has only led to the conversion of about one percent of the Japanese population, the proportion of writers who have either been baptized or significantly influenced in their work by Christian teachings is much higher. The seventeen authors examined in this volume have all employed themes and imagery in their writings influenced by Christian teachings. Those writing between the 1880s and the start of World War II were largely drawn to the Protestant emphasis on individual freedom, though many of them eventually rejected sectarian affiliation. Since 1945, on the other hand, Catholicism has produced a number of religiously committed authors, led by figures such as Endo Shusaku, the most popular and influential Christian writer in Japan to date. The authors discussed in these essays have contributed in a variety of ways to the indigenization of the imported religion.
eBook
Reversed Conversion, Theodicy, and Cross-cultural Mission in Shūsaku Endō's Silence and Zhenyun Liu's Someone to Talk To
To present the complex relationship between Christianity and modern non-Western societies, this article compares two novels from East Asia, Silence (1966) by Japanese writer Shūsaku Endō and Someone to Talk To (2009) by Chinese novelist Liu Zhenyun, that touch on themes of Christianity and cross-cultural tensions in indigenous contexts, including theodicy, suffering, and hope. Endō portrays a Japanese society through the eyes of a western Catholic priest. In comparison, Liu's literary innovation presents a possibility of missionary integration through humanly mundane details of life.
Journal Article
Ryuzo Mikimoto and the Ruskin ‘Relics’ Exhibitions of 1926, 1931 and 1933
One of the foremost Japanese Ruskinians, Ryuzo Mikimoto (1893–1971), held a Ruskin exhibition in Tokyo from 6 to 8 February 1926. Attracting about 2,000 visitors, it was the first exhibition in Japan of the nineteenth-century British art critic and social reformer John Ruskin. The exhibits included the first editions of The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice, the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ, and Ruskin’s autograph manuscripts, drawings, photographs and letters Ryuzo collected in Britain in the 1920s, amounting to nearly 150 pieces in all. As the son of the ‘Pearl King’ Kokichi Mikimoto, Ryuzo was expected to succeed his father’s jewellery business, but instead devoted himself to the introduction of the life and works of the Victorian polymath. Later he organised Ruskin exhibitions again not only in Tokyo, but also in Kyoto and Kobe, where the Christian social movement provided significant momentum toward the labour and peace movements. As in the painting A Stray Child (1902) by Taikan Yokoyama, which shows a Japanese surrounded by Western and Eastern philosophers and redeemers, Japanese young intellectuals faced a spiritual crisis after a massive influx of Western thought and subsequent cultural and social changes to westernize Japan. Ryuzo, a Protestant Christian, stated that he had chosen Ruskin rather than Karl Marx, Buddha and Christ. In fact, he revered Ruskin as a kind of a saviour who could resolve the predicament of the modern industrialised country. Based on primary sources such as a 1926 exhibition catalogue, related newspaper articles, and The Journal of the Ruskin Society of Tokyo Ryuzo issued, this study reconstructs the exhibitions, reconsiders Ryuzo’s Ruskin in the context of the history of religious thought in modern Japan, and sheds light on his peace-oriented and non-elitist endeavours to disseminate Ruskin’s ideas on art and society in Japan.
Journal Article
The Martyrs of Japan
An examinination of the role that Catholic missionary orders played in the dissemination of accounts of Christian martyrdom in Japan. The author offers an overarching portrayal of the writing, printing, and circulation of books of \"Japano-martyrology.\".
eBook