CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Xu, Yitong |
|---|---|
| Title | Becoming the City of Prayers: Christianity and the Formation of Local Public History in 20th Century Nagasaki |
| Summary | Founded in the late 16th Century as a centre of maritime commerce and Catholic proselytisation in Japan, the city of Nagasaki was transformed into a centre of anti-Christian persecution and state-monitored foreign trade by the policy of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603 - 1868). Even after the Meiji Constitution of 1889 guaranteed the religious freedom of the Christians, this history of early modern Nagasaki still caused a border of memory that divided the ways the Catholic and non-Catholic populations of Nagasaki perceived the city’s origin well into the 20th Century. By looking at three specific episodes in Nagasaki during the period between the late 1920s and the late 1940s, this thesis analyses how this border of memory informed the formation of both the Catholic and the non-Catholic narratives regarding Nagasaki’s Christian past through public anniversaries, religious feast days and the city’s post-atomic bombing urban planning. In contrast to the contemporary official rhetoric which saw the early modern history of ‘Christian Nagasaki’ as one of cosmopolitanism cultural exchange and co-habitation, this thesis concludes that ‘Christian Nagasaki’ remained a fractured mnemonic landscape in the early to mid-20th Century which gave rise to a shifting political dynamic of confrontation and collaboration between Catholicism and the rise and fall of Japan’s militant nationalism. |
| Supervisor | Seaton, Philip Andrew |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/xu_yitong.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University