Epistolary endurance: The ‘grammar of separation’ in seventeenth-century letters by Japanese-born Christian women in Batavia

Abstract This article examines a corpus of seventeenth-century letters written by Japanese-born Christian women exiled to Batavia following Tokugawa Japan’s anti-Christian measures of the late 1630s. Known as jagatara-bumi (Jakarta letters), these texts were produced under conditions of enforced separation, delayed communication, and close surveillance, circulating through Dutch, Chinese, and Nagasaki intermediaries. Situating them within the contexts of Tokugawa persecution, transregional communicative regimes, and early modern epistolary cultures, the article argues that letter-writing functioned as a form of epistolary endurance: a practice of sustaining relational presence across distance and faced with uncertainty. It develops the concept of a ‘grammar of separation’ to describe the historically situated, patterned ways in which rupture was articulated and managed in exile. Rather than reading these letters as transparent records, it treats them as structured practices shaped by convention, constraint, and hybrid religious vocabularies, analysed across emotional, textual, social, and spiritual registers.