The Relationship Among the Catholic Religious Orders in Japan in the Late 16th – Early 17th Centuries

Although there are many works devoted to the history of the Christian century in Japan and the activities of the Catholic religious orders, the relationship between mendicant orders and the Society of Jesus has been mainly studied in terms of names, events and dates. Moreover, researchers most often examined the activities of the orders in terms of their influence on the cultural, economic and colonial processes in Southeast and East Asia, but recently turned to the study of the missionaries themselves, to the relationship between the orders in the period 1590-1614 and the influence of the surrounding reality. Meanwhile, new approaches, methods and concepts of historical science make it possible to consider these relationships within the framework of regional and global processes. For instance, the study of the relationship among the orders and their perception of each other in the context of the appearance on the Japanese islands of representatives of Protestant states, such as the United Provinces of the Netherlands in 1600 and England in 1609. Thus, this paper examines the relationship among the Catholic missionary orders through an analysis of the perceptions of each other in Japan in the late XVI and early XVII centuries. The main focus of the study is to analyze how the orders presented each other when representatives of the United Provinces of the Netherlands appeared in Japan in 1600. This approach will test the working hypothesis of the study about the global nature of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. At the same time, an analysis of the relationship between the orders in Japan will shed light on the peculiarities of the colonial policies of Portugal and Spain in the framework of global history in the late XVI - early XVII centuries.