Special Issue “Gender and emotion in early Japanese Christianity” – Introduction

Founded in the sixteenth century, the early modern Catholic missions to Japan represented the first sustained contact between Japan, Europe, and the latter’s worldwide trade networks. A rich cultural exchange between these two regions of the world, Europe and the Far East, sustained by missionaries such as those of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), marked the period from the founding of the enterprise by missionary Francis Xavier in 1549, to the Sakoku edicts of closure of the country, issued by shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu in the 1630s. While the Catholic missions have received much attention in the historiography, the use of gender and emotions as lenses to analyse the dynamics of these intercultural dialogues has been neglected in the literature, despite their utility in opening up new lines of research in the field.