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Deus Destroyed: Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (East Asian Monograph)

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George Elison's DEUS DESTROYED IS a very scholarly work, but one without a raison d'etre. That is to say, although giving a thorough overview of the activity of Catholic missionaries in 16th century Japan, and calling it "heroic but doomed", he never explains why it was desirable that they should have succeeded in Japan. There is only one paragraph, written by a Jesuit, which could serve as a justification, describing what he calls the "low value the Japanese place on human life", but most of the practices decried in it and elsewhere-- such as homosexuality, abortion, and principled suicide-- would be defensible from a libertarian point of view.

Furthermore, Elison does not place the missionaries' activities in the context of the history of the period. For this was precisely the century of the Reformation. Catholic Spain had joined the Roman Catholic Church in an effort to root out "heresy", "witches", Jews and Muslims which had been going on since the 12th century and which was called the Inquisition. The more politically enlightened nations, which tended toward Protestantism, were fighting a life-or-death struggle for survival against its tyranny. The Low Countries were in the midst of an eighty-year revolution against Spain. England, which had the most highly developed institutions of political liberty, nevertheless stood to lose all if Spain's Philip II, united to the English Queen Mary during her brief and bloody reign, could make good his claim on the English throne. The first missionaries to reach Japan were from Portugal, whose institutions were almost identical to those of its Iberian neighbor, and which was soon to be united with Spain under the same crown-- those crack soldiers of the Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits. And they found that country in a most vulnerable state, disunited and wracked with civil war. In truth the Catholics were as much a threat to Japan as they were to England and the Low Countries.

Some idea of what might have happened to Japan at the hands of these missionaries if they had succeeded can be gained from what happened to the Portugese colony at Goa, India. In 1560, the Jesuit who had first reached Japan and who ultimately ended up in India, Francis Xavier, called for an office of an Inquisition to be set up in that colony. The result was a reign of terror. The missionaries had hardly time enough to truly convert any Indian to Christianity and yet already they were torturing and executing them for understandably clinging to their old religions. A favorite technique was to go to Hindu neighborhoods and smear beef fat on people's faces, shaming them in their own eyes and the eyes of their co-religionists, then take them to be "worked over" until they were ready to "convert" to Christianity. Of course pork would be used in Muslim neighborhoods. The Goan Inquisition even persecuted fellow Christians who did not happen to follow the Catholic faith, such as the Thomas Christians who had been converted centuries earlier by St. Thomas. We do not know the exact numbers of those persecuted because the Inquisition not surprisingly destroyed all its records after it was terminated in 1812, but surviving records indicate that some 4,000 people were arrested in the first few years alone. In the first hundred years, some 71 had been burnt at the stake, and they were probably the lucky ones. According to one historian, "the screams of agony of the victims (men, women and children) could be heard in the silence of the night as they were brutally interrogated, flogged and dismembered in front of their relatives." (see Wikipedia article on Goa Inquisition). Why should the Japanese have to suffer like this?

I am not saying that no one should read this book, because it provides precious documents for reconstructing the history of 16th century Japan. Above all, it provides the original text (in English translation of course) of a vitally important decree (or rather, two decrees) issued by Hideyoshi in July 1587. They are generally regarded as "expulsion decrees" and although they did thankfully at last evict the missionaries, they did far more than this. They forbade forced conversion and enshrined freedom of conscience-- the Japanese term, as one learns from George Sansom, A History of Japan 1334-1615 p. 348, is KOKORO SHIDAI"-- "according to a man's own heart or sentiments". Elison says that the decree was not a guarantee of religious toleration, and although Japan never needed such guarantees, having enjoyed religious toleration throughout its history until the advent of Christianity, that was in fact exactly what it was. For what form of intolerance can be worse than forced conversion? It also outlawed the desecration of Buddhist and Shinto holy places and the selling of Japanese into slavery in order to finance the missionaries' activities. One can only regret that the Goans did not have the power to fight back as did the Japanese. Despite Elison's twisted depiction of this happy outcome as "tragic", readers will find it heartening to read some of the original anti-Christian literature produced by the Japanese and see how their good sense won out over the religious superstitions that the missionaries attempted to force down their throats.