“Why did Japan reject Christianity?” is a question that has been debated for more than four hundred years, and the end of the debate is not yet in sight by any means. In fact, this new book under review has already started to reinvigorate the discussion, which, for a few decades in the late twentieth century, seemed to have reached a dead end. Gone (thank God!) are the centuries of lament for the souls lost in Japan. Gone, also, are the days of the deluded autocrats, the fallible Jesuits, and the suave apostates of more recent ilk. The question, however, still remains: “What motivated Japan's military leadership, as represented especially by Toyotomi Hideyoshi and the first three Tokugawa shoguns, to prohibit the thought and belief system that everyone always thought to have been lying at the core of Western civilization?”

Slowly, we are starting to see the outline of new answers that are emerging from taking these leaders and their reasoning seriously. As there are very few Japanese sources left that allow us to penetrate their thinking directly, there remain two main venues that allow us to approach the problem, simultaneously, from the front and from the back. The first is the study of the stimulus for their decisions: the types of Christianity brought to Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The second is the study of the intellectual climate in Japan that arose as a result of their decisions. Although Paramore briefly deals, in the first chapter of his book, with some of the different interpretations of Christianity, at least in so far as they were available in Japanese, his work belongs mainly to the second approach. The interesting thing here is that both approaches now seem to point to the same answer: the urgent need of Japan's military leaders for an ideology that would support and strengthen their newly created state.

Both Hideyoshi and Ieyasu were empire builders, and as such they clearly recognized the Portuguese and Spanish crowns as potentially dangerous rivals, who were spreading their sea-borne domination across the globe. When the two Iberian crowns were united in 1581, their combined might seemed, for a while, unstoppable. This was the international background to the first prohibition of Christianity by Hideyoshi in 1587. Thus, Hideyoshi clearly seems to have recognized Christianity for what it was: an ideology that supported the rapacious overseas thrust of Iberian power in Africa, Asia as well as in the New World. Hideyoshi, however, absorbed as he was in his project to eliminate his closest rival for imperial power, that is, Ming China, did not succeed in countering the perceived Catholic threat with his own alternative ideology. That task was undertaken by the Tokugawa rulers and their supporters, as Herman Ooms and others have shown.

Mistaken Western views that Ieyasu started out as neutral or even faintly well-disposed towards Christianity have long been abandoned in Japan. The firm date, based on the research of Gonoi Takashi, Paramore mentions of 1605 (when Ieyasu took measures to prevent the spread of Christianity among his own retainers) can be pushed back even further: to 1602, when in a Vermillion-Seal letter issued to a Spanish merchant from the Philippines, Ieyasu formally granted him and others permission to reside in Japan “wherever they wanted,” but “rigorously” forbade them to “spread their law.” In general, this book shows, through its familiarity with the parameters of the debate in Japanese academia, a refreshing independence from the accepted canon of English-language scholarship. As is obvious to anyone familiar with the first quarter of seventeenth-century Japan, one of the most important initial steps in the process of hammering out an ideology able to support the bakuhan-state was the extermination of the rival ideology of Christianity.

In the second chapter of the book under review, Paramore explores an interesting parallel between early Tokugawa Confucianism, as expounded by Fujiwara Seika and Hayashi Razan, and late Japanese Christianity, as he finds it mainly in the writings of Fabian Fukan. He proposes that the two traditions were “fighting the same battles” (p. 41), both showing a “move towards intellectual paradigms that locate truth in externalized social hierarchies rather than in the processes of individual internalized thought or discernment.” (p. 50) In the third chapter, Paramore deals with the actual suppression of Christianity and the anti-Christian texts it generated among Bakufu officials and sympathizers. Much more could be said about this topic, but it is clear that the author's chief interest lies beyond the actual period of suppression in how anti-Christian discourse survived the demise of Christianity itself in Japan.

This is the main thrust of Chapters 4 through 6. In this second half of the book, Paramore describes how anti-Christian discourse continued to be applied to other types of thinking that were likewise deemed subversive of the Tokugawa order. He distinguishes two distinctly different stages, mediated by a third. The first stage occurred in the second half of the seventeenth century, when thinkers such as Kumazawa Banzan and others inspired by “Wang Yang-ming-ist Confucianism” (p. 85) came to be labeled “mutations of Christianity” (pp. 84, 101). Paramore locates the second important stage of “post-Christian–anti-Christian” discourse in the Bakumatsu period when this discourse came to be coupled to the sonnō jō’i 尊王攘夷 platform. These two stages were connected by a mid-Tokugawa stage of a less rabid and more objective anti-Christianity, mainly from Arai Hakuseki and Ogyū Sorai, which simply concluded that Christianity (understood to be encouraging loyalty to God over that to the hierarchy of the ruling class) was inappropriate for Japan.

In this way, Paramore argues, anti-Christian discourse became a state-supporting system of orthodoxy that carried over from the Tokugawa era well into the Meiji period and influenced the emperor-centered ideology of the twentieth century in important ways. Although many of the details of this thesis are well known, the book as a whole presents a stimulating, new synthesis of the history of anti-Christianity in Japan. However, it is far from being the last word on the subject. One area Paramore barely touches upon, for example, is how anti-Christianity came to be embedded in Tokugawa custom and law. Some turns of phrase, moreover, especially the ironic (or even sarcastic) ways in which the words “strangely” and “interestingly” are sometimes employed, are a little grating in their youthful hubris. In the future, it may be better to show some restraint in this respect and instead concentrate on avoiding the kind of careless mistakes that ultimately determine whether one has done one's homework.

To give but one example, on p. 120 the author introduces Aizawa Seishisai's Kikōben 豈好弁, the three title characters of which also decorate the cover of his book. As printed in the locus indicated, however, the title reads Tōkōben 荳好弁, or, nonsensically, a “Discourse on Loving Beans” (the kammuri of the initial character should be yama, as on the cover, and not kusa as in the text). Others may have different quibbles; the range Paramore spans is too wide for there to be no mistakes, lacunae or omissions. But it is heartening to see this book published so soon after the author finished his graduate studies at Tokyo University, and it is even more gratifying to know that he is employed as a pre-modern historian in the Netherlands, in Leiden. On p. 187 (note 5 to Chapter 5), Paramore promises his readers that he intends make an in-depth study of the interaction between Arai Hakuseki and Giovanni Sidotti through “a close examination of the remaining Dutch and Japanese records.” When he fulfills this promise, the Dutch records for Tokugawa history will finally get the attention they deserve from someone, through sheer proximity, best able to use them.