The Samurai & the Cross

Christian Encounters with Japan (1549–1945)
Hist 4010/Theo 5010 – Spring 2024
Wednesdays 10:00–12:30 p.m. @ The Ricci Institute 2125 Commonwealth Ave. (Brighton Campus) 

This course is an introduction to the history of Christianity in Japan, from its foundation in the sixteenth century to the early decades of the Meiji period. We will conclude with the atomic bomb’s destruction of Nagasaki in 1945. Francis Xavier, the first Christian missionary in Japan, arrived in 1549; and his successors continued to found Christian communities throughout Japan for decades thereafter.

They also helped to establish the international trading port of Nagasaki. The complex intercultural encounters and clashes between the Japanese and their European interlocutors took place during the early modern period—an age of great social and political upheaval dominated by the samurai warrior class. A long period of systematic persecution broke out in 1614 under the newly established Edo shogunate. Japanese Christians were forced into hiding and survived for two hundred and sixty years without clergy, creating their own secret rituals. They would only re-emerge in 1865, after the arrival of the French. A new wave of persecution followed during the early years of the Meiji Restoration, until it finally ceased in 1873 on account of foreign diplomatic pressure from Europe and the United States. In 1889 the newly promulgated Meiji Constitution enshrined the principle of religious freedom for all citizens.

Students will make use of the unique textual, material, and visual culture of the period (rare books, manuscripts, maps, paintings, engravings, sculptures, ceramics, and other artifacts) in the collections of the Ricci Institute and the Burns Library to explore how and why Japan first embraced and then rejected this new faith, its culture, and its adherents— before accepting it anew. Lectures will be complemented by individual student research projects and presentations.

M. Antoni J. Ucerler, S.J.
Director, Ricci Institute, Boston College