A History of Jesuit Missions in Japan by Guillaume Alonge

Author:Guillaume Alonge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2023-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Christianizing ancient cults

The story of the miraculous tree of Arima presents another element of considerable interest, which concerns the relationship immediately established, in the words of the Jesuit priest, with the pre-Christian spiritual background. The tree in question, as mentioned, was not just any tree, but had already had its own previous sacral aspect within the local Shinto and Buddhist cults, and the fundamental characteristic of being able to drive out demons was recognized. For this reason, Fróis tells us, the Japanese would take branches at the beginning of the year to place inside their homes to protect the hearth.45 And here the choice of the date of the story does not seem accidental: on December 25, a few days away from the celebration of the first of the year, that same tree revered by the Japanese underwent a transformation from a sacred pagan tree to a sacred Christian tree, coinciding with the nativity of Christ. Nevertheless, it did not lose its original characteristics in any way.

At the end of the story, in fact, some “effects” produced by the miraculous tree are presented, among which the story of a man who had lost his mind for over a year stands out. Having learned of the discovery of the crosses in the tree, his wife decided to go there, to remove a small piece from the trunk and make her mad husband drink it with water. The man immediately recovered his psychic stability. The fact of having ingested a piece of the sacred tree had the power to drive away the demon inhabiting his body.46 In the account of the Jesuits, pieces of the sacred tree, ingested or placed at the entrance to the house, would retain the primordial protective and anti-demonic function attributed to them in the pre-Christian culture. It is proof, on the one hand, of a continuity of popular beliefs, despite the stratification of different doctrines, and on the other, above all, of the ability of the missionaries to appropriate and exploit previous cults and customs to bring the local populations closer to the Catholic faith.47

The Arima tree was not destined to remain an isolated case, as evidenced just two years later, in 1592, by the occurrence of a second episode that was similar in many ways, but which presented peculiar aspects worth examining. The worsening of persecutions against Christians and the now systematic dismantling of those crosses through which the Jesuits had deluded themselves that they could take over sacred Japanese spaces warranted a decisive change of context. The annual letter from Japan was once again written by Father Fróis, who, however, in this second case, was more explicit in emphasizing the existence of a link between the destruction of the wooden crosses by the authorities and the appearance of a miraculous new cross on the trunk of a tree.48 The episode took place in the castle of Fukuda (“Fucunda”), in the lands of Ōmura, governed by a Christian lord, Dom Sancho (Yoshiaki), and was explicitly interpreted as a recurrence of the miracle of Arima.

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