Rebecca Suter, Holy Ghosts : The Christian Century in Modern Japanese Fiction

One of the most difficult tasks for a student of Japanese history is to truly understand the ebb and flow of Japan's contacts with the outside world.There appears to be a struggle within Japanese society whether Japan should retain its own "unique" culture or whether it should be engaged in a form of "hybridization" of its cultural norms with worthy elements of foreign cultures.At times Japan closes itself off from the outside world, while at other times it appears to open itself up to foreign influences.Rebecca Suter visits this question in great detail in Holy Ghosts.Her focus is the socalled "Christian century of Japan" (1549-1638) when Japan made its first real contact with the West with the arrival of Jesuit missionaries, the final Christian revolt, and the formal ban on Christianity by the new Tokugawa Shogunate.She is particularly interested in the repeated appearance of the "Christian century" in modern Japanese fiction and how modern writers such as Akutagawa Rynosuke, End Shsaku, and others have handled Japan's reaction to penetration by foreign cultures.She argues that although the topics of these stories focus on this earlier period, these writers are really debating Japan's position in the modern world.Throughout her work Suter has discovered a tendency by domestic and foreign media "to characterize Japanese culture as exceptional/exceptionalist" (108).The term Nihonjiron is based on the presumption that "the Japanese constitute a culturally and socially homogenous racial entity, whose essence is virtually unchanged from prehistoric times down to the present day," and that they "differ radically from all