CONN 347 | First Encounters: Japan and Europe in the 16th Century

The arrival of the first Portuguese trade ship in Japan in 1542 brought to Japan and some European countries a new and different Other that forced both sides to reevaluate their understanding of their own cultures. A wide range of texts produced during the first 100 years of that encounter document how both sides struggled to define the new cultures they found and place them in the context of their known worlds, even as those worlds were often changed by that process. Using a multidisciplinary approach, students will examine letters, maps, reports, religious treatises, legal documents, and literary accounts produced by European traders and missionaries on the one hand, and by Japanese officials, religious scholars and chroniclers on the other, to identify the discourses that these documents constructed of the Other during this period. They will analyze which voices dominated those discourses and which were silenced, what political, economic and religious factors influenced them, and what power those discourses exerted over relations between Japan and Europe. Finally, they will read two 20th-century Japanese fictional accounts of the period and watch an American film, and examine how those earlier discourses were employed in the analysis of contemporary issues and themes.