Myths, Missions, and Mistrust: The Research Paper

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There was so much instability in Japan at this time, according to Nelson, that it was not difficult for the Christians to simply move around and find places (like in Nobunaga's realm) where they could spread the word of Christianity. "Japan…is always revolving like a wheel; for he who today is a great lord, may be a penniless nobody tomorrow" (Boxer 1951: 74; Nelson 98). Nelson (99) points out that Nobunaga like the anti-Buddhist attitude of the missionaries; however, he also notes that the historian George Sansom argued that Nobunaga did not hate Buddhism, he simply did not like the way that it managed to interfere in political matters. Some Buddhists sects came to be wary of Christians because of Nobunaga's liking for them; it was the fact that Nobunaga thought that the Christians knew their place and the Buddhist monks did not that was the main difference for Nobunaga's like for one and contempt for another.

Nelson (99) suggests that, with a lot of effort on the Jesuits' part, Christianity was slowly and surely making its way into mainstream Japan, however, Nelson states that "it is doubtful they [the missionaries] ever really trusted their converts' religious beliefs. This was probably even confused more by the fact that Xavier had to rely upon Yajiro, a translator who worked for him, who had to use Buddhist vocabulary or terms in order to convey Christian ideas and beliefs to the Japanese (100). Nelson (99) points out that this made it very likely that Christianity was just seen as another sect of Buddhism. There is no doubt then why the missionaries would doubt their converts' religious beliefs as it seems that they were apparently being instructed on Buddhist tenets if the vocabulary used was one associated with Buddhism.

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Japan was so different from European culture at the time and it is no doubt that they found the Christian "way" strange. Nelson (100) discusses some of the negative ideas associated with Christians at the time using "the fact they ritually consumed 'human blood' (red wine)" as an example of how Christians could negatively be viewed. The problem again seems to be that the missionaries had little regard not only for the Japanese culture but they also seemed to disregard the fact that their rituals and beliefs may look utterly peculiar and (cannibalistic) when taken out of context.

…since the Japanese were primarily centered on the communities in which they lived -- where local deities were attentive to specific petitions concerning livelihood, political stability, or family life -- the Jesuit message of a nonlocal, transcendent kingdom of God must have seemed even stranger than the men who espoused it. For farmers to consider themselves somehow independent of their neighbors and then to fashion this independence into an autonomous spirituality would have been impossible from a conceptual point-of-view (Endo et al. 1977: 217; Nelson 100).

Nelson is sufficiently able to express the problems that missionaries encountered while in Japan while at the same time point out some of their biggest and most fatal flaws when it came to conversion. He notes that today there is a presence of Christianity in Japan, mainly in the wedding industry at Christmas shopping time (107) and, interestingly enough, he is able to make a quite fascinating association with Christianity and its economical reasons for spreading during the 16th and 17th century and today how the "trappings of Christianity" are just "another accessory for modern consumer life" (107).

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