Conference: The Making of Christian Law in Late Medieval and Early Modern Japan

[Rômulo Ehalt]

Dear PMJS members,

With apologies for cross-posting.
If you will be in Tokyo or Kyoto in early March, we invite you to join us for two sessions exploring early modern Japanese legal history. These presentations integrate Japanese scholarship, global legal history, and cultural studies to investigate the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century processes by which missionaries developed legal and moral norms for Japanese Christian communities. All presentations will be in English, but there will be interpretation available for the Q&A. 

(※本イベントにおける報告はすべて英語で実施されます。 なお、質疑応答については通訳を介しての進行が可能です。)

Check the program below

Best,

Rômulo

PS: This event won’t be hybrid, and there will be no recording available

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The Making of Christian Law in Late Medieval and Early Modern Japan: Theology, Casuistry, and Legal Adaptation / 中近世日本におけるキリスト教法の形成：神学・決議論・法の適応

SESSION 1: TOKYO (SUNDAY 3.1.2026 | Keio University, Mita Campus | Orii Yoshimi)

Coordinator/Staff: Victor Laubenstein (PhD Student, TUFS)

Admission: Free (予約不要)

Contact: yo...@keio.jp (折井) / victorla...@gmail.com (Victor)

Schedule

16:00-16:10 | Welcome Remarks: Orii Yoshimi (Keio Univ.)

16:10-16:50 | “The Legal History of Slavery in the Kirishitan Period: The 1598 Episcopal Excommunications and the Legal Deconstruction of Slavery in Japan”

Speaker: Rômulo Ehalt (Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Germany)

Abstract: This presentation examines a crucial text in the history of slavery in Japan: the De mancipiis Indicis (c. 1610), a treatise written by Gomes Vaz, a former Jesuit procurator in India. Discussing slavery across more than twenty regions under Jesuit mission in early modern Asia, Vaz details a project aimed at shifting the Jesuit approach to the Japanese slave trade at the beginning of the seventeenth, from the casuistic weighing of individual "cases of conscience" century toward a strategy of jurisdictional externalization. At the center of this transition are the letters of excommunication issued by the Bishops of Japan, which transformed the moral problem of slavery into an absolute, non-negotiable legal ban. The presentation centers on an analysis of Vaz’s treatise, which provides the only surviving record of Bishop Luís Cerqueira’s decree of September 4, 1598. Vaz deconstructs the legal standing of slavery, reframing it not as a fixed reality of the ius gentium or natural law, but as a fragile "artifice of human law" (relatio iure humano inventa) present across all different strands of law. By demonstrating that the excommunication letters all date from 1598 (rather than 1596 or 1597, as scholars previously believed), this presentation explores how Vaz harmonized three disparate legal acts—the 1570 Portuguese royal alvará, the 1598 episcopal excommunications, and Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s prohibitions, aiming at changing the way the Portuguese Empire related to Japan and seeking to legally dissolve the institution of slavery within the Japanese mission to secure the Portuguese presence in Asia.

16:50-17:30 | “On Omura Sumitada’s motivations for forcibly Christianizing his territories”

Speaker: James Fujitani (University of Nottingham)

Abstract: In 1569, about eleven years before he granted the port of Nagasaki to the Jesuits, Omura Sumitada decided to entirely Christianize his territories. All inhabitants either had to accept baptism or leave the land. It is not clear why he made this radical decision. Without any particular evidence, historians have assumed that he was either coerced into doing so by the Jesuits or that he was motivated by religious fanaticism. This paper offers an alternative explanation, arguing that he was in fact acting quite strategically. He was unifying his territories under a single rule, just like other Warring States’ daimyō of the time, such as Oda Nobunaga.

17:40-18:20 | “Made in Japan. Why and how probabilism emerged at the end of the Sengoku period?”

Speaker: José Luis Egío (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

Abstract: In this presentation, I will show how the encounter between Portuguese Jesuit missionaries and Japanese pagans at the end of the Sengoku period came as a cultural shock to the European preachers. Surprised by the sophistication of a culture rich in ancient religious and philosophical traditions and by the Japanese people’s firmness in their native moral convictions, which were a source of resistance to the intense work of religious indoctrination, the Christian missionaries encountered a failure they had not experienced before among other non European Pagan peoples. Therefore, in order to convert a greater number of Japanese to Christianity, they had to adapt and relax some of the strict moral norms of theological foundation that regulated social and family life in Christian Europe at that time. We will see how this problematic arrival of Christianity in Japan, together with the theological doubts raised by the innovations in commercial practices that the global expansion of commercial networks during this same period made mandatory, ultimately gave rise to a new method for resolving philosophical and ethical doubts. We are referring to probabilism, or the doctrine according to which, in order to resolve an uncertain moral problem, any of the probable answers to it can be followed, even if it is not the most probable solution or answer. This is a major “invention” in the history of thought, in which Japan and the Japanese played a fundamental role.

SESSION 2: KYOTO (TUESDAY 3.3.2026 | Kyoto University, Jinbunken | Orii Yoshimi & Hiraoka Ryūji)

Coordinator/Staff: Victor Laubenstein (PhD Student, TUFS)

Schedule14:30-14:45 | Welcome Remarks: Hiraoka Ryūji (Kyoto Univ.) & Orii Yoshimi (Keio Univ.)

14:50-15:30 | "From his perch on a donkey, he conducts war": Francisco Rodrigues SJ (c. 1515-1573) and the production of normative knowledge in Portuguese Asia”

Speaker: Rômulo Ehalt (Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory)

Abstract: This presentation, based on the upcoming edited volume "Evidences of Truth," examines the complex and polarizing figure of Francisco Rodrigues, SJ (c. 1515-1573), a central actor in the Jesuit Province of India during the mid-sixteenth century. It explores Rodrigues's dual role as a powerful political "gray eminence" in Goa and a leading intellectual authority on cases of conscience. Despite severe criticism from contemporaries, Rodrigues served as an essential advisor to viceroys, the Inquisition, and royal officials. As a professor at the College of São Paulo and a prolific writer, Rodrigues authored numerous pareceres (opinions) on sensitive moral and legal issues, including matrimonies, contracts, and slavery. By analyzing his writings, this study illustrates how Rodrigues synthesized the lived experiences of missionaries in the field with the authoritative traditions of canon and Roman law. Ultimately, it argues that Rodrigues was a primary link in the process of cultural translation, transforming ethnographic reports and local missionary encounters into the normative guidelines that shaped religious and social order across the Portuguese Estado da Índia, from East Africa to the Japanese archipelago.

15:40-16:20 | “The struggle of Rodrigues and the Jesuit missionaries to introduce Christian marriage in XVIth century Japan. Main customary and cultural challenges”

Speaker: José Luis Egío (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

Abstract: In this presentation I will examine the strategies developed by Jesuit missionaries during the second half of the 16th century to introduce Christian marriage in Japan. Focusing on figures such as Melchior Carneiro and Francisco Rodrigues, I will analyze their approaches to two major challenges: the impedimentum disparitatis cultus (impediment due to disparity of worship) and the customary practice of repudiation in early modern Japan. The study highlights how these theologians adapted European canon law and moral theology to local contexts, advocating for normative flexibility to avoid social disruption and facilitate evangelization. By comparing the Jesuit perspectives about Japan with the ones adopted by missionaries working at the same time in the American continent, I will also show how a transcontinental dialogue between Christian missionaries on both sides of the Pacific Ocean took place leading to a flexibilisation of theological norms and to pastoral pragmatism.