Hayashi Razan’s Redeployment of Anti-Christian Discourse: The Fabrication of Haiyaso
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Year:
- 2006
- Journal Title:
- Japan Forum
- Volume:
- 18
- Issue:
- 2
- Language:
- Abstract:
Haiyaso, a short text found in the collected works of the early Tokugawa Confucian Hayashi Razan (1583–1657), purports to be a record of a debate held in 1606 between Razan and the famous Japanese Jesuit scholastic Habian (1585–1621). The debate is presented in the text as a confrontation between Confucianism and Christianity. In the modern period, right up to the present, the text has been used prolifically to present ‘a conflict between Western thought and East Asian intellectual systems’ as one of the central stories of the intellectual history of early seventeenth-century Japan. In this sense, the text has been used to justify the imposition of fashionable modern dichotomies – between ‘East and West’ and ‘rational and religious’ – onto the intellectual history of Tokugawa Japan. This outlook has been supported by an inaccurate representation of Habian's Jesuit period treatise Myōtei mondō as some kind of ‘introduction to Western thought’. In fact, Myōtei mondō is a much more complex work which, among other things, shows the clear influence of Confucian and Neo-Confucian humanism.
This article goes back to the extant source documents of indigenous Japanese Jesuit thought, and the attacks on it in the early seventeenth century. Through examining the ideas of Habian in contrast with other Japanese and Chinese Jesuit texts, and by analysing the context within which Haiyaso sits in Hayashi Razan's collected documents, the paper demonstrates that Haiyaso was a fabrication, in the sense that it is a work of propaganda probably written well after Habian's death, and imputing to Habian views that he clearly did not hold.
- Who (Jesuits):
- What (Subjects):
- Where (Locations):
- When (Centuries):
- Publisher URL:
- Page Range:
- 185–206
- ISSN:
- 0955-58031469-932X
- DOI: