After Jesuit mi ssionaries introduced Christianity to Japan in 1549\, the Christian communi ty grew rapidly\, both among the samurai class and the common populace. By 1600 there were an estimated 450\,000 converts amongst a total Japanese pop ulation of approximately twelve million. With the unification of Japan by T okugawa Ieyasu\, there was an increasing need on the part of the shogunate to impose religious and ideological conformity. Christianity\, perceived as a direct threat to the newly established social and political order\, was banned in 1614. Two hundred sixty years of systematic persecution ensued.
In this talk\, M. Antoni J. Ucerler\, S.J. will explore how the concer n over a ”spiritual conquest” of the Japanese populace was the dominant fac tor for prohibition\, persecution\, and the closing of the country to all E uropeans except for Dutch merchants.
The event is free and open to th e public. Registration is not required.
M. Ant oni J. Ucerler\, S.J. (D.Phil.\, Oxon.) is a British-born Canadian-American of Polish and Turkish descent. Since entering the Society of Jesus in Ital y in 1981\, he has spent decades engaged with Japan\, where he taught compa rative intellectual history at Sophia University.
He has also taught at the University of Oxford\, Georgetown University\, and the University of San Francisco. He is the Director of the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Weste rn Cultural History at Boston College\, which engages in interdisciplinary research on the history of Christianity in East Asia in partnership with sc holars from across the world. His main areas of interest are the history of Christianity in premodern Japan\, as well as in China and Korea\, global i ntellectual history in the early modern era\, transcultural translation\, a nd the material and visual culture produced by these encounters\, including the history of the book.
CATEGORIES:Featured Japanese LOCATION:Asian Centre\, Room 604 GEO:49.263704;-123.254783 URL;VALUE=URI:https://asia.ubc.ca/events/event/the-samurai-the-cross-tempor al-or-spiritual-conquest-in-early-modern-japan/ ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://asia.cms.arts.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2023/09/actually-this-one.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:-0800 TZOFFSETTO:-0700 DTSTART:20230312T100000 TZNAME:PDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR