Dr. Shimada Takuya joins the MMA team as postdoctoral researcher. Dr. Shimada 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. 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.
In the MMA project, Dr. Shimada will investigate the local contexts of the mining industry of early Tokugawa Japan, specifically the human and institutional resources that catalyzed a dramatic increase in the archipelago’s silver production. His current research focuses on the managerial role of local mining officials (jiyakunin) at shogunal mines like Iwami and Sado, and the mines’ connections to coastal shipping routes that spurred the archipelago’s commercial development.
His article, “Negotiating on a Precarious Assumption: Dissimulatio, Political Ethics, and the First Japanese Anti-Jesuit Edict (1587),” is forthcoming in Diplomatica.