The Politics of Affect in the Era of the Ban: The Tokugawa Shogunate’s “Fear–Pity–Humiliation” Strategy and the Emotional Resistance of Catholic Communities, 1614–1873

This paper examines the emotional politics employed by the Tokugawa shogunate during the period of Christian suppression in early modern Japan (1614–1873), analyzing how state-sponsored strategies of fear, pity, and shame were systematically deployed to dismantle Catholic networks and enforce religious conformity. Rather than viewing persecution solely as a legal or military campaign, this study situates it within the framework of affective governance, wherein emotional experiences were deliberately orchestrated through ritualized practices such as the fumie (image trampling) and institutional mechanisms like the terauke (temple registration) system. The fumie ceremony, widely implemented at ports and village checkpoints, functioned not only as a tool of identification but also as a performative act of public humiliation, designed to induce shame and sever individuals’ psychological attachment to Christianity. Concurrently, the terauke system embedded religious surveillance within bureaucratic and familial structures, compelling individuals to publicly renounce their faith under threat of social exclusion, thereby producing internalized guilt and spiritual alienation. State-organized executions, particularly high-profile martyrdoms such as the Great Nagasaki Martyrdom of 1628, were staged as spectacles intended to instill terror while simultaneously evoking pity—emotions that, paradoxically, were reinterpreted by onlookers and clandestine believers as signs of spiritual heroism and divine grace. Far from passively accepting these imposed affective regimes, underground Christian communities engaged in complex processes of emotional resistance, transforming state-inflicted suffering into sacred endurance and communal solidarity. Through oral transmission of prayers, domestic rituals, and gendered practices of maternal devotion, hidden Christians preserved an affective continuity of faith across generations. Women, in particular, emerged as crucial agents of emotional resilience, maintaining devotional life within private spheres. By analyzing the dialectics between institutionalized emotional control and subaltern affective agency, this study demonstrates that the Tokugawa regime’s triad of fear, pity, and shame achieved partial compliance but inadvertently fostered counter-emotions that sustained Catholic identity in covert forms. This research contributes to global histories of emotion and religious persecution by illustrating how premodern states instrumentalized affect as a technology of power, while subordinate groups reclaimed emotional experience as a site of resistance.