The digitized collection provides accounts on 250 years of anti-Christian persecution, and it is the largest feudal archive outside Japan.
Newsroom (02/03/2022 9:02 PM) At the Vatican Apostolic Library, a collection comprising 14,000 ancient documents about the history of the persecution of Christians in Japan during the Edo period (17th to 19th century) has been entirely digitized and made available to historians. The project has been made possible thanks to the close collaboration between the Holy See and several major Japanese cultural institutions.
This invaluable cultural treasure is the work of an Italian missionary, Father Mario Marega, a salesian who lived in Japan between 1930 and 1974. Responsible for the Italian translation of the Kojiki, the oldest chronicle of Japanese myths and legends, Fr. Marega was a great scholar of Japanese culture and local history.
Through a network of personal contacts, he collected thousands of jō, i.e., “crushed” rolls of paper, in which – after the Edo shogunate banned Christianity in 1612 – the local daimyo (feudal lord) in Bungo (today Usuki, Ōita prefecture) continued for decades to write reports on the families of first Christian converts.
In addition to providing accounts of the anti-Christian persecution, the mass of documents offers a much broader insight into the reality of rural life in Japan in pre-modern times.
In 1953, Fr Marega sent to the Vatican all the collected material in 108 boxes through the apostolic nuncio to Japan. But for a Western library, the collection was difficult to manage.
These documents were stored in a warehouse for many decades until they were rediscovered in March 2011, when the Marega Project started as a partnership between the Vatican Library and several Japanese academic organizations, including the National Institutes for the Humanities (NIHU).
Thus began a long process of inventory and restoration that involved numerous entities. Collaboration with Far East experts was critical, for restoring ancient Japanese handwritten papers requires minutely precise treatments. The entire collection was finally digitized, and now scholars and researchers will be able to access the various documents online.
“As history would have it, the largest feudal archive outside Japan is now conserved here in the library,” said Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, librarian and archivist of the Holy Roman Church.
In his view, “the documents preserved in the Marega Collection are fundamental for reconstructing the history of Japanese Christianity. But their historical value goes far beyond this context. The documentation produced constitutes a nuanced portrait of Japanese society in the pre-modern era.”
Bishop Cesare Pasini, Prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Library, stressed the symbolic value of the collaboration with the Japanese partners. “By working together on documents that bear witness to a persecution that lasted two and a half centuries, it was possible to build a common experience,” he explains.
The Project “took the form of an exchange of expertise that broadened and deepened in mutual knowledge and esteem.” Indeed, “We like to describe this positive experience under the name of cultural diplomacy: culture enables us to establish relations and to deal with even the most delicate or thorny issues with finesse and accuracy.”
In fact, “even where history has inflicted wounds or known contrasts or pitted us against one another, we can build understanding and acceptance, harmony and respect, by researching and investigating, explaining and contextualizing, and making respectful memories of everyone and everything. And we get to know the lives of peoples even better. Not a random message, least of all in our times,” he concluded.
(Via Asianews.it)
Compiled by Raju Hasmukh
