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3550 Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, CA 90089
Once a Jôdo Nun, Now a Jesuit Catechist
SUMMARY
Haruko Nawata Ward, Associate Professor of Church History at Columbia Theological Seminary and author of Women Religious Leaders in Japan's Christian Century, 1549-1650, will share her research on the fascinating figure Naitō Julia. Julia, who was once abbess of a Pure Land Buddhist convent, became a successful evangelist for the Jesuit mission in Japan. Ward will use Fucan Fabian's 1607Myōtei mondō to explore how Julia and her community of Christian nuns may have understood the differences between Buddhism, Shinto, Confucianism, Daoism, and Christianity in early 17th century Japan.
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Abstract
Standard historiography of the church in Kyoto during the Christian Century (1549-1650) does not mention the remarkable leader, Naitō Julia, once an abbess of a Jōdo convent, who became a successful evangelist for the Jesuit mission in Japan. She founded and led a society of Christian women catechists, whom people called the Miyaco no bicuni (nuns of Kyoto). Between 1600 and 1612, Julia and her nuns preached, engaged in religious disputations, catechized, baptized hundreds of persons, and provided pastoral care for the new converts. Standard Japanese historiography of the Edo period also obliterated her memory because the anti-Christian government regarded Julia and the Miyaco no bicuni as criminals. Arrested, tortured and then deported to Manila in 1614, the women maintained a contemplative community after Julia's death in 1627 until 1656 when the last two members perished. Only the Jesuits remembered and recorded some details of their biographies and their society's history. Although none of the women's writings survive to tell us about their ideas and experiences, we can see how they might have understood differences between Buddhism, Shinto, Confucianism, Taoism and Christianity in the text of Fucan Fabian's Myōtei mondō (1607).
Biography
Haruko Nawata Ward is Associate Professor of Church History at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA. She is the author of Women Religious Leaders in Japan's Christian Century, 1549-1650 (Ashgate, 2009). Her recent articles include "Japan and Europe: The Christian Century, 1549-1600," in Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Margaret King (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); "Women and Kirishitanban Literature: Translation, Gender and Theology in Early Modern Japan," in Early Modern Women: an Interdisciplinary Journal, v.7 (2012); and "Jesuit Encounters with Confucianism in Early Modern Japan," in The Sixteenth Century Journal 40, no. 4 (winter 2009). She has several chapter contributions such as "Women in the Eyes of a Jesuit between the East Indies, New Spain and Early Modern Europe," in Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age (1522-1671), ed. Christina H. Lee (Ashgate, 2012) and "Martyrdom and Religious Violence" in T and T Clark Companion to Reformation Theology, ed. David M. Whitford (2012). She was William Scheide Fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton, in 2011-12.
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