Emotional Practices of Catholic Martyrdom in Early Modern Japan

The wave of persecutions that hit the Japanese Catholic community between the end of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century had among its consequences the production of a great number of texts by its missionaries and local clergy. Eyewitness accounts, letters written by the condemned, and summarizing reports, paint vivid images of the martyrs, providing many details about their final days. Martyrdom manuals, on the other hand, took on a more didactic tone, to illustrate to the Japanese, and remind to the missionaries, the principles of martyrdom, and to adapt them to their specific cultural and historical context. This paper analyzes examples from this vast corpus in order to identify the emotional practices that characterized the models of martyrdom of the Japanese Catholic community. Such practices were implemented to mobilize, regulate, and communicate the correct emotional attitudes, to help creating the desired spiritual predispositions. Before and during the executions, which was a key event in reasserting the values of the threatened Catholic community, the actions of all those involved came under scrutiny; emotional practices represented a map to navigate this emotionally charged situation, to avoid the loss of self-control and to reach the desired outcome of martyrdom.