Meticulously researched and drawing on original source materials written in eight different languages, this study fills a lacuna in the historiography of Christianity in Japan, which up to now has paid little or no attention to the experience of women. Focusing on the century between the introduction of Christianity in Japan by Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in 1549 and the Japanese government's commitment to the eradication of Christianity in the mid-seventeenth century, this book outlines how women provided crucial leadership in the spread, nurture, and maintenance of the faith through various apostolic ministries. The author's research on the religious backgrounds of women from different schools of late medieval Japanese Shinto-Buddhism sheds light on individual women's choices to embrace or reject the Reformed Catholicism of the Jesuits, and explores the continuity and discontinuity of their religious expressions. The book is divided into four sections devoted to an in-depth study of different types of apostolates: nuns (women who took up monastic vocations), witches (the women leaders of the Shinto-Buddhist tradition who resisted Jesuit teachings), catechists (women who engaged in ministries of persuasion and conversion), and sisters (women devoted to missions of mercy). Analyzing primary sources including Jesuit histories, letters and reports, especially Luís Fróis' História de Japão, hagiography and family chronicles, each section provides a broad understanding of how these women, in the context of misogynistic society and theology, utilized resources from their traditional religions to new Christian adaptations and specific religio-social issues, creating unique hybrids of Catholicism and Buddhism. The inclusion of Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese texts, many available for the first time in English, and the dramatic conclusion that women were largely responsible for the trajectory of Christianity in early modern Japan, makes this book an essential reading for scholars of women's history, religious history, history of Christianity, and Asian history.

Japanese historian Louis Perez brings Mikiso Hane's rich and beloved account of early Japanese history up-to-date in this thoroughly revised Second Edition of Premodern Japan. The text traces the key developments of Japanese history in the premodern period, including the establishment of the imperial dynasty, early influences from China and Korea, the rise of the samurai class and the establishment of feudalism, the culture and society of the long Tokugawa period, the rise of Confucianism and Shinto nationalism, and finally, the end of Tokugawa rule. While the text provides many political developments through the early modern period, it also integrates the social, cultural, and intellectual aspects of Japanese history as well. Perez's updates to the text provide a comprehensive overview of the major social, political, and religious trends in premodern Japan as well as offering the most current scholarship.

This history of the Catholic Church in Asia and the Pacific illuminates the processes of globalization Since the sixteenth century, Catholicism has contributed significantly to global connectivity. Except for the Philippines and Timor-Leste, Catholicism in Asia is, and is likely to remain, a minority religion. For this reason, it can serve as a unique prism through which to look at the processes of globalization in Asia. Asian Pacific Catholicism and Globalization demonstrates to scholars and students of Catholic history that the development of Catholicism in Asia and later in the Oceania-Pacific region is closely associated with three different phases of globalization. This book approaches the historical processes of globalization not as structural agencies or causal forces, but rather as the historical contexts that condition possibilities for human action and reaction in the world. The editors identify three distinct phases in the development of Catholicism in Asia and Oceania: early modern (sixteenth–eighteenth centuries), modern Western hegemony (1780s–1960s), and the contemporary (1960s–present). The book’s contributors discuss the development of Catholicism in all the major countries of the region, including China, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, India, and Australia.

An examinination of the role that Catholic missionary orders played in the dissemination of accounts of Christian martyrdom in Japan. The author offers an overarching portrayal of the writing, printing, and circulation of books of “Japano-martyrology.”