In the second half of the sixteenth century, during what Charles Boxer in his classic study called the Christian century in Japan, Portuguese Jesuits established a flourishing Japanese Catholic community. Haruko Nawata Ward has written an outstanding study of Japanese Catholic women in this period. Ward combines feminist analysis with theological sophistication, a thorough command of primary sources in Japanese and European languages, and a profound understanding of the indigenous religious and social contexts that shaped these women's encounter with Christianity. She draws from letters held in the Jesuit archives in Rome, the monumental História de Japão and the Tratado of the Jesuit missionary Luís Fróis (1532–1597), and “Kirishitanban” catechisms, devotional books, and theological works written in or translated into Japanese. Ward shows that women were central to spreading and maintaining Christianity in Japan. They “created their own space of ministry beyond the Jesuit initiative” and “utilized theological, liturgical, communal, and practical tools from the Shinto-Buddhist past in creating their own Kirishitan [Christian] mission” (11).

Ward organizes her book into four parts: Nuns, Witches, Women Catechists, and Sisters. In part 1, Nuns, she examines how Japanese Christian women responded to the vocation of chastity and the contradictory ideals of religious seclusion and an active apostolate. Ward shows how Shinto and Buddhism shaped Japanese women's Catholicism. For instance, Naitō Julia, a former abbess of a Jōdo Buddhist convent, became a Catholic nun. Like Buddhism, Christianity offered a life of religious vocation as an alternative to marriage. “Beyond their doctrinal interest in the afterlife,” Ward writes, “there were other commonalities between Jōdo Buddhist and Kirishitan monastic practices. There was a natural continuity in Naitō Julia's life as a Buddhist bikuni [nun] and as a Kirishitan beata (holy woman)” (67). Buddhist and Christian religious orders for women shared similar dress, discipline, and ritual observances. Naitō Julia and other converts from Buddhism also engaged in the “standard Jōdo method of expository preaching based on the scriptural text” (68), now Christian rather than Buddhist.

What drew Naitō Julia and others from Jōdo Buddhism to Christianity, Ward argues, was the latter's more inclusive doctrine of salvation. Both religions promised rebirth in paradise, one through the intercession of Amida Buddha, one through Jesus Christ. Yet the non-canonical but influential scripture Ketsubonkyō taught that women could achieve salvation only by lamenting their existence as women. Amida Buddha would then turn them into men for rebirth in the Pure Land. Conversion to Christianity, Ward says, freed women from Shinto-Buddhist misogyny.

Christianity did not, however, appeal to all women. In part 2, Witches, Ward discusses a woman whom the Jesuits referred to as Jezebel—her real name has been lost—who was hostile toward Christianity. Her enmity was in part because of her descent from hereditary priests of the Shinto cult of Hachiman. She also had ties to the Kumano tradition of Shingon Buddhism, which taught women how to avoid falling into the lake of menstrual blood that was the Jōdo hell for women. Equally if not more significant in her abhorrence of Christianity was betrayal by her husband, Ōtomo Sōrin Francisco. After his conversion, he repudiated Jezebel, after a thirty-year marriage, to marry a Christian concubine. The Jesuits supported him and annulled his marriage to Jezebel.

To the Portuguese Jesuits, Jezebel was a witch, knowingly collaborating with the devil to oppose the church. Moreover, Kumano Buddhist nuns, according to the Jesuits, were “idolatrous tools of demons, licentious prostitutes, and sorcerers” (156). Jesuits exorcists and traditional healers competed, the Jesuits regarding the body of the possessed “as a battleground between the God of the Kirishitans and the devil of Shinto-Buddhism” (161). The Jesuits and their rivals shared a magical world in which each side literally demonized the other.

Part 3, Women Catechists, examines, among others, the most famous Kirishitan woman, Hosokawa Tama Gracia (1563–1600). She is probably best known through her fictionalized portrayal as Lady Mariko in James Clavell's bestselling novel Shogun (New York: Atheneum, 1975). An aristocrat like most of Ward's examples, Hosokawa Gracia was secretly baptized by her lady-in-waiting, a catechist. Hosokawa Gracia had been an adherent of Zen, “the least misogynist” (216) of late medieval Japanese Buddhist schools (see, for example, Barbara Ruch, Engendering Faith: Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002). Though not a member of a Zen religious order, she excelled in Zen methods of disputation. Luís Fróis wrote that Hosokawa Gracia had “the mind of a monster,” a degree of intellectual ability monstrous in a woman. (In later writings, Fróis called her “manly,” a term of praise.) Her conversion to Christianity was one of intellectual persuasion, through the reading of Kirishitanban literature, including Kontemutsusu munji – Contemptus mundi, a translation of Thomas à Kempis's The Imitation of Christ. She suffered in her marriage to an abusive husband, but the Jesuit fathers urged her to acquiesce, warning that her plan to flee was the work of the devil. She stayed with her husband and was killed in the war that brought the Tokugawa regime to power.

Part 4, Sisters, examines Kirishitan women's confraternities and works of mercy. It looks particularly at the Nagasaki Confraria de Misericórdia, which operated schools, ran shelters for orphans and abandoned children, and carried out rituals. As persecution of Christians increased early in the seventeenth century and drove Jesuits underground, women lay ministers of Marian confraternities undertook sacramental responsibility for baptisms, presided over funerals, and heard confessions.

Persecution nearly annihilated Christianity during the Edo period (1603–1868). Ward argues that “the shift in politico-religious ideology in the first half of the seventeenth century and Japan's total rejection of Christianity was largely caused by the unprecedented apostolate of Kirishitan women” and as a result women's “freedom of movement, association, property ownership, participation in public discourse, and learning became severely restricted” (289). I am skeptical of this argument. There were other reasons why the Tokugawa regime adopted Neo-Confucian orthodoxy. Nonetheless, this book convincingly demonstrates the centrality of women in early modern Japanese Christianity. It is superbly done.