You are best known for your work on the archaeology of Japan, dealing with much earlier periods. What made you want to write about the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?
Japan is still too often seen as a nation apart, its history explained by insularity and isolation. Throughout my career I have been critical of that approach. Over the past few years I have published several articles on globalisation in early Japan, focusing especially on the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age. A common narrative has been to accept that Japan was more or less open to the outside at certain periods, but that the overall impact of that exchange never managed to override an essential kernel of Japanese-ness. That has certainly been the dominant approach to the ‘Christian Century’ period explored in Europe and the End of Medieval Japan.
The first chapter contains quite a long discussion of the historiography. That is obviously something that you find interesting.
Yes, I wanted to understand the particular ways in which the early contact between Europe and Japan has come to be portrayed by historians. The issue of modernity is key here. How did Japan manage to be the first nation in Asia to adopt industrial modernity? In the book I argue that the Iberian impact has been played down as a Catholic and therefore essentially anti-modern encounter. This is then contrasted with the ‘authentic’ opening of Japan by a Protestant United States in the late nineteenth century. As I began my reading for the book, I was fascinated by how the ‘Black Legend’ of an anti-modern Iberia still constrains our understanding of early modern Japan.
Were you influenced by the recent TV series Shōgun?
Actually no! I have seen clips but not yet the whole programme. I did watch the first TV series in 1980 and read Clavell’s novel around that time. Looking back, I suppose this had some influence on my decision to study Japan at university—against the objections of my deputy headmaster who thought Oriental Studies (as it was then known) could only lead to a career in missionary work!
How did you approach Christianity as a religion?
I wanted to get away from the idea that religion in Japan is somehow a separate category of human behaviour than that found elsewhere. As I discuss in the book, many Japanese historians have concluded that Japan was so exceptional and different to Europe that it was not Christianity that gained so many converts in the late sixteenth century, but a completely new religion they term Kirishitan. That word is itself derived from the Portuguese, but the basic argument is that Japan didn’t have ‘proper’ Christianity like in Europe because it was mixed with local folk beliefs. When we look at Europe in the sixteenth century, however, we find a wide variety of folk practices that are rarely mentioned by Japanese historians. Christianity eventually came to be seen as a political threat by the shōgun, but there is also a sense in which the whole idea of syncretism between European and Japanese religious practices is regarded as disturbing because the folk has been imagined as an index of authentic Japanese identity.
The book contains quite a bit of archaeology, some of it from your own work.
Archaeological study of early modern Christian sites and artefacts began in Japan over a century ago but is poorly known in English. Research on burials is especially interesting because it shows the continuing strength of Christian beliefs even after the religion was persecuted and banned. In the book I was also able to bring in the work on treponemal disease we did during my excavations at the Nagabaka site on Miyako Island in the southern Ryukyus. Given recent historical interest in material culture, this is an area with great potential for further work.
How do you plan to connect this book to your future research?
The ‘global’ status of premodern Japan remains one of my key interests. Medievalists have become more and more concerned with the ‘Global Middle Ages’. At the same time, Bronze Age specialists have been talking about Bronze Age globalisation or ‘bronsisation’. In my future research I hope to explore differences and similarities between these two periods.
By Mark Hudson