Contested Spaces and Ritual Practices in Early Modern Nagasaki

The Suwa Festival and the Christian Procession of Corpus Christi

Abstract

At the turn of the 17th century, in Nagasaki, religious processions become a tool to promote the economic and political interests of Christian missions and the anti-Christian Japanese government. In this article, I argue that the Shinto celebration of Suwa employs strategies that are almost identical to those of Corpus Christi to organize, control, and articulate the city’s population and space, but with the goal of subverting the ideological bases of the Christian celebration. In the Corpus procession, the organization of the city into neighborhoods, parishes, and Christian institutions converges with local forms of social regulation—from family structures to those of the civil administration—to affirm the triumph of Christianity over human hierarchies and urban space. In the Suwa, these local forms of organization adapt to promote the idea of the restoration of a proper Japanese order after the prohibition of Christianity, which puts the marginalized of the Christian city right at the center of the Shinto celebration.