Triplett, Katja (ed.); Orii, Yoshimi (ed.); Jolliffe, Pia (ed.) (2025). “Japan in the Early Modern World: Religion, Translation, and Transnational Relations”, J.B. Metzler / Springer, Übersetzungskulturen der Frühen Neuzeit.
Publisher / DOI: doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-70424-0
Born of a 2022 Leipzig symposium, this volume gathers historians of religion, translation, and the book around a single claim: that Japan's early modern relations with Europe, 1550–1800, were made by translators in the broadest sense — missionaries, interpreters, printers, merchants, and the Japanese converts who remade Christianity in their own material and linguistic terms. Contributions range from Higashibaba Ikuo revisiting native agency in the translation of Christianity, to Paula Hoyos Hattori on how Jesuit letters from Japan were edited into Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1599), to Triplett's detective work on a 1596 Jesuit mission print that ended up in the Bodleian.
We flag it here for its scope rather than any single thesis — collected volumes are always uneven, and we have reviewed the shape, not every chapter. But the through-line matters to this archive: the language work we describe in our articles on João Rodrigues and on Portuguese loanwords was not a sideshow of the encounter; on this volume's showing, it was the encounter.
Reviewed by Nanban.pt editorial, 2026-07-04.