Shogun and the Translation of God

1.

I was surprised to find tears rolling down my cheeks when I watched the tea ceremony scene in Shogun a few weeks ago. I don’t know why it touched me so deeply. I was not such a big fan of the show— and yet watching the scene, I was completely floored. It was so beautifully filmed. And I felt it captured something true to my own experience with chanoyu in Japan.

Over the course of my life, I have studied a few things. When I was young, I loved dance—studying ballet as a child and Javanese and Balinese dance in Indonesia (and in grad school in the states) as a young adult. I have also taken up calligraphy and bit of ikebana. But my tea ceremony lessons were without a doubt the most meaningful lessons of my life, having the strongest bond with a teacher I’ver ever had. I loved my lessons and miss my sensei very much.

Of course, I have never had an experience like the one in Shogun —just two people sharing the ceremony together in what started out at least to be a very romantic scene. The music just heightened everything. And Mariko’s kimono was so beautiful.

Below, I copied a video clip of the scene, along with the same scene from the 1980 movie Shogun, the one with Richard Chamberlain. I have not watched that movie yet, but I know it follows the original novel more closely with its focus on the British navigator Anjin-san and the tension with the Portuguese Catholics in the Japan of the time.

As I wrote about in this post, Japan had long been a special focus of the Jesuits from the very beginning of their order, when Francis Xavier himself traveled to Kagoshima in the year 1549 with two religious companions and a Japanese interpreter. Xavier promptly fell in love with the country. Calling Japan ‘the joy of his heart,’ he found them to be the most perfect people in the world for understanding his Christian message. For Xavier, Japan was always the foreign nation best suited to Christianity— and so despite increasing persecution of Christians by the Shogunate, the Jesuits kept coming.

I don’t know if scholars still use this term, but the period between 1550-1650 has been called Japan’s “Christian Century.” At first, the Japan Mission was hugely successful—it was said there were some 300,000 converts in the decades after Xavier was there. The early Shoguns were on intimate terms with the Portuguese Jesuits—mainly interested in expanding the silk trade with China, which was handled by Portuguese merchants based in Macau (Chinese silk for Japanese silver).

Japan, like Goa, Macau and Malacca before it, could have been on its way to becoming a Portuguese colony—except it probably wasn’t ever going to happen, since Japan has never been a colony of any country. We will never know since the rulers of Japan turned cold toward the Portuguese around 1600. There were many reasons for the Shogun’s sudden change of heart. And one of those reasons was the coming of the British Protestants, notably including the British boat navigator William Adams, known in Japan as Miura Anjin (Japanese: 三浦按針, "the pilot of Miura").

James Clavall’s protagonist in his novel Shogun is loosely based on Adams’ life.

2.

Anyway, did you notice in the last episode when Anjin-san said he was praying-not to the Catholic God and not to the Protestant God, but “just to God…” That was a great moment—since the name of God was much on people’s minds in those days. In the show the Portuguese Catholics and Mariko sama refer to God by the Latin name Deus, to differentiate their God from the Shinto kami.

This issue of translation was really a problem among the jesuits at the time. In the autumn of 1628, (eight years after Anjin san’s death) the Jesuit Father Visitor to the East, Andre Palmeiro, embarked on a long journey. Based at the Jesuit Mission in Macau, he was dispatched to travel all the way to Beijing in order to settle a heated dispute about how to best translate the name of the Christian God into Chinese. The issue came about as part of Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci’s particularly accommodating style of proselytizing in China. In setting his sights on the souls of the educated elite of the country, rather than the poor, Ricci was known for going around in the fine silk robes of a Chinese litaratus and for delivering sermons framed in Chinese philosophical terms.

Ricci was attempting as much as possible to dress up the Christian God in Confucian clothing. But in choosing the ancient Chinese term for a supreme deity Shangdi 上帝 as a translation for God, some wondered if he hadn’t gone too far.

Even today this kind of translation issue is nowhere near settled. For example in the past several years in Malaysia, the courts have had to weigh in several times on whether Allah is a permitted translation for the Christian God or other gods. There is already a general Malay term for god, tuhan; so for them the Arabic term Allah is the name of one God—their God. That is how one side sees it, while the other wants to use Allah as a bona fide translation in the Bible. For a long time in Malaysia it was prohibited to use the word Allah as a translation—until 2021, when the ruling was upturned.

Ricci’s accommodation approach might be called localization in today’s terms—and for Father Visitor Palmeiro this was not new; for as it turned out it was the first issue he had to sort out upon his arrival in the East, many years before the Ricci dispute. This occurred on his first posting in Southern India, where an issue came about concerning another problematic padre. Like Ricci, Roberto de Nobili was a highly educated and linguistically talented Italian. Unlike Ricci, de Nobili claimed aristocratic birth and so sought to work within the ideology of the Hindu Caste system. So, the lower caste Saint Thomas Christians of Southern India were never the focus of his care or missionary activities. He aimed high. And by high, he was looking at the Brahmins. He was famous for walking the streets in the garb of an Indian ascetic in a white dhoti, wooden sandals, and three-stringed thread across his chest, which he claimed represented the Holy Trinity. The padre could read Sanskrit and was extremely knowledgeable about Indian philosophy and so he framed his version of Christianity in terms of Hindu ideology.

For the Father Visitor, there was never a dull moment.

To read:

Vox Magazine: “How real is Shōgun? The FX and Hulu hit depicts a bloody, brutal, mostly thwarted colonial history of Japan. It’s based in the truth. By Nylah Iqbal Muhammad (Great quotes by Morgan Pitelka

Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan, by Giles Milton —and I heard there is a new book coming out on his life.

Matthew Brockey’s The Visitor: André Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia