Orientalism and Monotheism in Studies of Early Japanese Christianity

Abstract

In the wake of Said’s landmark work, Orientalism (Said 1979), scholars have been widely concerned with countering the value-laden interpretations which have historically traveled with ‘colonialist’ or ‘Orientalist’ analyses of reli-gions in Japan. However, modern studies of early Japanese Christianity, i.e., Japan’s Kakure Kirishitan (hidden Christians), despite their emergence in the ‘post-colonialist world’, have often maintained a subterranean, Orientalizing tendency to generalize and abstract an inauthentic or compromised Christi-anity of early modern Japan against that of a more genuinely Christian West. Kakure interpretations of monotheism, the doctrine of the Trinity, and certain worship practices are portrayed as ‘polytheistic’, ‘syncretistic’, and as uniquely serious misunderstandings or abrogations of both ‘Christian theolo-gy’ and the very concept of monotheism. Meanwhile, Western Christianities, despite their own analogous and statistically-demonstrable penchant for mis-conception and theological imagination, are subsequently implied to be more authentically or quintessentially monotheistic or Christian. This essentializing configuration betrays an a priori separation of ‘Japanese’ and ‘Western’ reli-gions and raises the question as to whether analysts operating in the ‘post-colonial era’ have yet to become fully aware of the basic warning of Said’s Orientalism – a still-timely message which is not, as some seem to believe, centered on the errors of a specifically Western hegemony, but on the dangers of otherizing in general as a form of devaluation.