This collection of essays, edited by Haruka Oba, Akihiko Watanabe, and Florian Schaffenrath, offers a new, multifaceted view into studies of Kulturkontakt (cultural contact) between Europe and Japan, with particular emphasis on Neo-Latin drama performed in Jesuit schools. The contributions originate from a conference which took place in Vienna, Austria in 2018. Building upon the work of Adrian Hsia and Ruprecht Wimmer's Mission und Theater: Japan und China auf den Bühnen der Gesellschaft Jesu (2005), which opened avenues for philologically deeper and more geographically diverse studies of Jesuit plays about Japan, the scholars in this volume deliver three sets of interventions: first, further elucidation of broad questions on early modern European-Japanese interactions, such as news transmission, or the meanings of martyrdom; second, further clarity on the representation of Japan on Jesuit stages within particular national contexts—e.g., France, the Netherlands, Croatia, and Poland; and third, a detailed philological analysis of exemplary works of Jesuit drama in which Japan plays a major role. The volume is divided into these three areas.
The editors’ introduction offers background on what Charles Boxer termed the “Christian Century” in Japan (from 1549 up to the 1640s), commentary on knowledge about Japan circulating throughout early modern Europe, and a look into theater as it was used in Europe's Jesuit schools. Before unfolding the contributing essays, the introductory writers also provide a helpful review of the state of scholarship on Jesuit plays dealing with East Asia.
Although some readers may understandably desire less neutral language than “cultural exchange” to describe the Jesuits’ interventions in Japan and the resultant theatrical responses, this view of the field is notably kaleidoscopic, encompassing work by scholars from many cultural backgrounds, including Japanese. Throughout the notes and bibliographies in Japan on the Jesuit Stage, additionally, one sees how much scholarship in this field relies on facility with multiple languages: Japanese, German, Polish, multiple Romance languages, and Neo-Latin, among others. Much of this scholarship relays new insights on little-known and often fragmentary primary sources (e.g., manuscripts, letters, and periochae). Altogether, what this volume may accomplish is to place more of this field's activity on view before scholars writing within literary and historical fields traditionally bounded by language or nationhood.
To conclude the volume's first segment, Patrick Schwemmer examines the transmission and transformation of news about Japan through Jesuit letters, and Mirjam Döpfert supplies an overview of the figure of the heroic Japanese martyr as a theatrical device. Indeed, in these chapters and those that follow, it must be observed that, however rooted in actual events, the Jesuits’ theatricalized presentations of Japan, in Schwemmer's words, “served the imaginative needs of contemporary Europeans” (36). Accordingly, these dramatic spectacles offer fertile ground for critical investigations of cultural and racial stereotypes employed by the Society of Jesus.
The second section of Japan on the Jesuit Stage takes the reader through a sweeping array of geographical and linguistic domains for particularized study: France (Hitomi Omata Rappo), Flanders and Belgium (Nicholas De Sutter and Joran Proot), Bohemia (Kateřina Bobková-Valentová and Magdaléna Jacková), Croatia (Nina Čengić and Neven Jovanović), and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (one study by Monika Miazek-Męczyńska, and another by Justyna Łukaszewska-Haberkowa). These analyses explore famous works such as Titus Japonensis, for which De Sutter and Proot have prepared an edited text, alongside other dramas for which no texts survive. Focused on the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century, the essays touch upon theatrical elements including neoclassical conventions, ballet, and visual arts. Three final case study essays by Margarida Miranda, Haruka Oba, and Akihiko Watanabe provide deeper investigations of particular Jesuit plays on Japan in Portugal and Bavaria.
As Watanabe remarks in the final essay, Jesuit plays on Japan have sometimes been dismissed as European-manufactured “exotica,” or as “derivative, propagandistic, and possibly racist” (329). Yet nonetheless, he suggests, these works may be productively reconciled with Japanese local records, or shed light on the outward-facing and culturally omnivorous dimensions of Europe's Neo-Latin literature. In that spirit, Japan on the Jesuit Stage offers an array of fresh avenues to scholars, from information networks to religious, social, cultural, and political dynamics between Europe and Asia. It recommends itself to scholars engaged in questions about early modern theater that cross nations, languages, and cultures.
