Encounters in the Glocal Mirror The Role of the Performing Arts in Japan’s Christian Century and its Reflection in Early Modern Europe, 1549–1783 This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Western Australia School of Humanities School of Music Makoto Harris Takao B.A. (Hons) 2017 THESIS DECLARATION I, Makoto Harris Takao, certify that: This thesis has been substantially accomplished during enrolment in the degree. This thesis does not contain material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in my name, in any university or other tertiary institution. No part of this work will, in the future, be used in a submission in my name, for any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution without the prior approval of The University of Western Australia and where applicable, any partner institution responsible for the joint-award of this degree. This thesis does not contain any material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. The work(s) are not in any way a violation or infringement of any copyright, trademark, patent, or other rights whatsoever of any person. This thesis contains only sole-authored work, some of which has been published and/or prepared for publication under sole authorship. Signature Date: 01.03.2017 AUTHORSHIP DECLARATION: SOLE AUTHOR PUBLICATIONS This thesis contains the following sole-authored work that has been published and/or prepared for publication. Details of the work Makoto Harris Takao, “Francis Xavier at the Court of Ōtomo Yoshishige: Representations of Religious Disputation between Jesuits and Buddhists in La conversione alla santa fede del re di Bungo giaponese (1703),” Journal of Jesuit Studies 3 (2016): 451–74. Location in Thesis Chapter Five, pp. 146–70. Details of the work Makoto Harris Takao, “‘In what storms of blood from Christ’s flock is Japan swimming?’: Performative Representations of the Japanese Female Martyr in Johann Baptist Adolph and Johann Bernhard Staudt’s Mulier Fortis (1698),” forthcoming in Changing Hearts: Performing Jesuit Emotions between Europe, Asia and the Americas, ed. Yasmin Haskell and Raphaële Garrod (Leiden: Brill). Location in Thesis Chapter Six, pp. 171–202. Signature Date: 01.03.2017 ABSTRACT “If we had organs, musical instruments and singers, all of Miyako and Sakai would be converted without any doubt within a year” – so said the Italian missionary Gnecchi- Soldo Organtino (1530–1609) in 1577 after seven years of proselytisation in Japan. The power attributed here to music as an intercultural communicative device is linked to the three weapons of the Catholic Reformation: rhetoric, cultural accommodation, and missionary formation. For the Society of Jesus, an itinerant order of men (known as Jesuits), the forging of these weapons was invoked by the command of Christ to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth (Matthew, 28:19). Indeed, apostolic mobility was woven into the very fabric of the Jesuits’ work by their founder, Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), from the order’s institution in 1540. The Jesuits’ foundation of a truly global outlook and practice thus created remote contact zones where the friction of first encounters with indigenous populations propelled the development of unique approaches to apostolic work. No more clearly is this use of accommodatio over a tabula rasa approach to proselytisation demonstrated, than in the Jesuit mission to Japan during its so-called ‘Christian Century’ (1549–1650). Musical and theatrical practices by Jesuit missionaries in Japan are thus interpreted in this dissertation as part and parcel of the Society’s “cultural mission”. In engaging with recent debates over the ‘global turn’ in historical scholarship, the multifaceted nature of these cultural encounters reveal shared pathways for discussion about states of global interconnectedness in the early modern period. This dissertation overviews the treatment of globalisation in Jesuit historiography to date and offers a new theoretical synthesis, with a focus on the nexus between Jesuit ‘universalism’ and various forms of local ‘particularism’ in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. As ‘cross-cultural brokers’, Jesuit missionaries are identified as ‘glocal’ intermediaries, facilitating the localisation of Jesuit religious and sociocultural traditions. The metaphor of a ‘Glocal Mirror’ is employed as a way of capturing the bi-directional nature of intercultural exchange, in addition to the ways in which ‘culture’ (in defining the inter-cultural) functions on two important levels: as recognition of boundaries (be they religious, ethnic, or linguistic) to be overcome; and/or the acknowledgment of shared understandings. The first half of the dissertation (‘The Object’) looks to the performative practices of conversion employed by Jesuit missionaries in Japan. In analysing how music and theatre were practiced and experienced in these local contexts, examples of performative syncretism are explored. The second half of the dissertation (‘The Reflection’) demonstrates how globalisation in this period entailed both a real and imagined defiance of geography. In this way, the ‘Glocal Mirror’ not only relayed a re-imagined image of Japan across Catholic Europe, but it also served as a medium through which continental Jesuits could see an exemplary reflection of their own faith in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Three case studies of different compositional genre (melodrama, oratorio, and tragedy) in Europe are analysed for evidence of how and why Japan’s Christian Century was interpreted and re-interpreted over space and time. The ‘object’ and its ‘reflection’ are two halves of a whole that have yet to be considered in the same space. Indeed, this dissertation argues that these examples of European ‘Japanese plays’ were part of a broader process of intercultural exchange, central to an understanding of the global and local history of the Japanese Church. CONTENTS Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................. i Stylistic Conventions ...................................................................................................................... iii List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. iv Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 1 The Global Order of the Society of Jesus ............................................................................... 1 Historical Globalisation ........................................................................................................ 4 Glocalisation as Globalisation ............................................................................................. 10 Looking into the Glocal Mirror ........................................................................................... 14 The Jesuits and Japan’s Christian Century............................................................................ 17 The Performing Arts as Cultural Mission ............................................................................. 20 Lessons from Historical Ethnomusicology ........................................................................... 23 Performance as Conversion and Performance of Conversion ................................................. 26 PART ONE: THE OBJECT Chapter One: Developing a Jesuit Tradition of Music ................................................................... 36 Jesuita non cantat ............................................................................................................... 36 The Jesuits Sing ................................................................................................................. 42 Misunderstood Missionaries ............................................................................................... 46 Lost in Translation or the Problem with God ........................................................................ 49 Balthasar Gago and the New Japanese Catechism ................................................................. 56 Chapter Two: Singing for Salvation .............................................................................................. 59 The Role of Children’s Music in the Japanese Church .......................................................... 62 Cosme de Torrès and the Boys of Bungo ............................................................................. 64 Chapter Three: Kirishitan Drama and its Vicissitudes ................................................................... 86 “In their own way”............................................................................................................. 86 Defining Kirishitan Drama ................................................................................................. 91 Biwa-hōshi and the Dramatisation of the Bible ..................................................................... 96 Performing the Paschal Mystery in 1561 ............................................................................ 106 Dancing for the Lord ........................................................................................................ 114 The Demise of the Misuteriyo-geki ...................................................................................