Tears on silk : Cross-cultural emotional performances among Japanese-born Christians in seventeenth-century Batavia

This essay explores how we can understand the emotional experiences of Japanese Christians living in Batavia after the Tokugawa Shogunate government’s edict in 1639 to exile from Japan partners and children of Dutch and English traders, past and present. It investigates a range of potential textual and material artefacts to elucidate the emotional experiences of this community, particularly those of women. Interpreting emotional display and behaviour across cultures has been a noted challenge for scholars of emotions. Here rhetorical, affective and social performances of emotions by individuals operating between or within multiple cultures are examined, including ritual practices such as letter-writing and gift-giving, and the visual, textual, and material representations of emotions that these circulated, in addition to teasing out the particular ways in which emotions were mediated as a function of Japanese Christians’ marginalisation within two of the cultures in which they interacted. This essay argues that these highly-situated emotional displays—in acts of correspondence, gift-giving and sociabilities or in documentary forms of letters, notarial acts, church registers and testaments—both reflected and enacted expressions of multiple identities.