Shimada Takuya
Postdoctoral Researcher
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Shimada Takuya is a historian of knowledge production in early modern Japan and Europe. He has previously explored Japanese-Catholic European diplomacy in Japan and the Italian peninsula. Within MMA, he will examine the local contexts of early Tokugawa mining, assessing the human and institutional resources behind an industry that produced more silver than at any earlier point in Japanese history.
Before joining MMA, Dr. Shimada was a doctoral researcher at the European University Institute, Italy, where he completed a thesis on the question of cultural (in)commensurability between early modern Japan and Catholic Europe by discussing Jesuit missionaries, the Japanese buke community, and the Tenshō mission.
His article, “Negotiating on a Precarious Assumption: Dissimulatio, Political Ethics, and the First Japanese Anti-Jesuit Edict (1587),” is forthcoming in Diplomatica. Viewing Jesuits as missionary-diplomatic actors in Japan, the work examines some political ethical factors behind a high-stakes diplomatic incident that led to the issuance of the 1587 edict, a political decision of the Japanese warlord leadership that had an irrevocable effect on the Japanese-Jesuit (Catholic European) relationship.
Dr. Shimada obtained his BA from Queen Mary, University of London, in 2014 and his MA from the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London, in 2019, before completing his PhD at the European University Institute in 2025.
Selected Publications
Takuya Shimada, “Japanese Context of the ‘Good Manners’ of the Legates of the Tensho Embassy in Italy (1585): The Buke Kojitsu, the Ise, and Kyūshū,” Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie orientale, 2023 (59), pp. 561-584.
Takuya Shimada, “Negotiating on a Precarious Assumption: Dissimulatio, Political Ethics, and the First Japanese Anti-Jesuit Edict (1587),” Diplomatica, forthcoming.
Takuya Shimada, “Reading in Context of a Letter of a Japanese Legate of the Tenshō Mission (1582-90): Itō Mancio, Bianca Cappello, and a ‘Relief’ Portrait of the Grand Duchess of Tuscany,” Archivio Storico Italiano, forthcoming.