Marina Pak (c. 1572–1636): An Attempted Reconstruction of Her Years in the Philippines

Abstract

Marina Pak (c. 1572–1636) entered Christian history as Korea’s first significantly cloistered individual, but researchers know almost nothing about her twenty-two years in the Philippines because of the scarce primary source testimonies. On the other hand, through interdisciplinary reflections on Marina’s pluralistic religious background, the influence of the Japanese state, the significance of the Pasig River, and her relationship in the Philippines with Miyako no Bikuni foundress Naitō Julia (c. 1566–1627), one can reconstruct the steps that Marina might have undertaken to navigate a Christian vocation in a foreign land. This article explores the ways in which Marina might have tried to reconcile three different cultural factors (the Korean identity of her birth, Japanese influences arising from her involuntary sojourn in Japan, and the Filipino culture of her final destination), and despite the tentative nature of the study’s conclusions, these findings may offer paths for future scholars to follow.

1. Introduction: Sources and Historiography

Accounts of Marina Pak (also known as Marina Paccu in the Jesuit chronicles) appear in Jesuit letters that have survived through various editions and compilers. Father Pedro Chirino (1557–1635) knew Marina during her actual lifetime, after which knowledge of the lady went to Francisco Colín (1592–1660), a Jesuit compiler. Later on, Father Pablo Pastells (1846–1932) published an authoritative narrative of the details of Marina’s life in a 1902 manuscript, the famous Labor Evangélica (Arcilla 1996; Ruiz-de-Medina 1987). Some details of Marina’s life seem rather typical for the Joseon Dynasty natives captured, enslaved, and forcibly brought to Japan during the Imjin War (1592–1598) that devastated the Korean peninsula. Born in about 1572, she converted to Catholic Christianity in 1606, and she offered the three religious vows (chastity, poverty, and obedience) for the sake of the Miyako no Bikuni (the nuns of Miyako), a group of Japanese women who seriously followed the callings of the cloistered life. Marina’s status as an enslaved person upon her arrival in Japan notwithstanding, she later accumulated a massive amount of property that she generously shared with fellow believers. As she resisted pressure to apostatize and the trauma of Japanese persecutions, Marina held firm in her faith. In 1614, the exasperated Japanese authorities sent Marina, her fellow Miyako no Bikuni companions, various Jesuits, and the helpers of those Christians to exile in the Philippines. In the Philippines, Marina coped with the frailties of her eyesight. God apparently remembered her in the final stages of her life, since she supposedly met the late foundress of her Miyako no Bikuni order in a vision. In 1636, she died at the age of approximately 64 (Colín and Pastells 1902).

Marina’s life reads like a compact hagiography, a hagiography sparse on concrete details but filled with commonalities with other Japanese Christians and Korean Christian exiles in Japan during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For this reason, scholars have tended to lump her story together with reflections on the vicissitudes of Japanese Christians and exiled Korean Christians during Japan’s so-called Christian Century (1549–1650). According to historian Lúcio de Sousa, Marina represents one illustrative case of a community of Korean slaves. He makes an understandable and easily overlooked mistake by stating that Marina died at the age of 74 (De Sousa 2019). In her attempts to rescue the Miyako no Bikuni from historical oblivion, religious historian Haruko Nawata Ward reconstructs the everyday lives of the cloistered sisters, but Ward says very little specifically on Marina Pak, arguably because Ward called attention to Marina’s lack of Japanese fluency (Ward 2009). Although De Sousa claims that Marina became “a fully ordained nun”, Ward firmly emphasizes the reality of the Jesuits not sanctioning any official sisterhood for women in Japan (De Sousa 2019; Ward 2009). As the person perhaps most academically responsible for De Sousa’s decision to label Marina Pak as a nun, Ruiz-de-Medina loudly proclaimed Marina Pak’s status as Korea’s first nun and the spiritual progenitor of all of Korea’s ordained nuns in the present day (Ruiz-de-Medina 1987). For the purposes of this article, the author wishes to sidestep debates on the status of Marina as a de jure nun in the Catholic hierarchy (or de facto nun in an unofficial Catholic hierarchy) because these debates only play a peripheral role in the questions addressed by this study.

In this article, the author hopes to uncover aspects of Marina’s life that have arguably gone unnoticed or unanalyzed—specifically Marina’s life in the Philippines. Using the Colín and Pastells text as the foundation of a scholarly inquiry, this article will aim to explore the life of a Korean lady whose Confucianism ironically may have played at least a small role in the ascendancy of her Christian faith. The paper then offers a reflection on the specific impact of Japanese edicts on Marina’s life. As it transitions into a discussion of Marina’s exile in the Philippine Islands, this study will also explore two topics specific to Marina’s circumstances, namely, the ways in which she tried to mentally navigate the realities of living near the Pasig River and the illustriousness of her final vision that involved the foundress of her order. In the first circumstance, the residual Buddhist influences of her Confucian background may have helped her adapt to life near the Pasig River, and in the second circumstance, Marina reaffirmed the intimacy of her shared life with Naitō Julia (c. 1566–1627), the foundress of the Miyako no Bikuni. While the narratives of everyday life in the Miyako no Bikuni might fascinate students of historical Catholic Christian spirituality, these narratives have nothing specific to the life of Marina Pak, so the author has decided to pass over these narratives. Through the lenses of history, missiology, historical theology, and environmental theology, this study offers a portrait—however fragmentary and tentative, given the severe limitations of the source material—of a cloistered woman who piously and courageously honored the nation of her birth and the supranational religion that captivated her conscience and solemnized her commitment to faith, hope, and love.

2. A Justification on the Usage of Lenses of History, Missiology, Historical Theology, and Environmental Theology (and the Extent of Insights Revealed or Concealed by Such Lenses)

Given the fragmentary nature of sources relating to Marina Pak, and given the fact that the sources may sometimes reveal more about the chroniclers than the subjects described in the sources, a reasonable question naturally arises over the validity of a scholarly exercise in analyzing the life of this particular Korean Catholic lady. A debate rages on the validity of constructing the interdisciplinary histories of ancient luminaries for whom primary sources do not exist, but this debate has not stopped the flow of well-regarded scholarly monographs composed in those traditions (Roisman 1994). By way of example, the major sources on Queen Seondeok of the Silla Kingdom (r. 632–647) have only survived in secondary compilations (notably the twelfth-century Samguk sagi and the thirteenth-century Samguk yusa) published long after her death. Academic discussions about the queen tend to assume subjective rather than objective dimensions. The unvarnished truth, then, has proven quite elusive. Given the singular nature of Seondeok, she elicits an emotive response, impeding any attitude of detachment for her amongst historians; one may either admire or dismiss her, with a great spectrum of attitudes in between (Lee 2008). The author of this article concedes that, barring the discovery of heretofore undiscovered sources, no authoritative biography of Marina Pak will ever emerge. This sobering reality aside, the arguable imperative of rescuing certain individuals from the periphery of history justifies the endeavor of reflecting on the Korean aspects of Marina Pak’s life. Although the famous scholar Charles Ralph Boxer viewed exiled Korean Christians in Japan as present in the Christian Century of Japan (1549–1650), he never really touched upon the Korean cultural influences that might have animated the everyday spirituality of those Koreans (Boxer 1967).

In the case of Marina Pak and other Korean martyrs under the spiritual guidance of the Jesuits in the Far East of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, another limitation would appear to arise in the reality of Marina’s life as a life told from the perspectives of Jesuit epistolary testimonies. Scholars have spilled an abundance of ink in taking sides on the reliability of such testimonies, particularly when such testimonies appear to show the Jesuit missionary’s understanding of a Christian convert’s interior spirituality. This controversy more broadly speaks to a bigger debate on how well European people of a bygone age often claimed to understand the interior consciousnesses of non-European premodern cultures. As scholar Tzvetan Todorov would put it, Columbus’s descriptions of the mindsets of New World inhabitants merely constituted attempts to justify viewpoints already affirmed by prejudiced or otherwise narrow-minded Europeans (Todorov 1984). On the other hand, the writings of the Jesuit missionaries invite a range of assessments, particularly because of the Jesuit fascination with accommodating the cultures of foreign lands. For some scholars, Jesuit accommodation essentially proves an argument that characterizes the missionaries as cultural relativists who embraced the differences of other cultures. Other scholars have viewed Jesuit accommodation as a practice that might have served as a precursor to Enlightenment attitudes of cultural relativism, but since the Jesuits prioritized the conversion of peoples above all other missionary aims, Jesuit accommodation merely served as a means to an end. The author of this paper wishes to take a middle position in this debate. While the Jesuits undoubtedly valued conversion as the end goal of missionary endeavors, the Jesuits (several exceptions notwithstanding) still insisted on the need for missionaries to love the cultures of foreign lands. In one notable case, the Italian Jesuit missionary Organtino Gnecci Soldi (1532–1609) told Japan-loathing Jesuit missionaries to simply go home, as he considered them examples of how not to do mission work (Ross 1999). In the case of Marina Pak, the Jesuits appear to have written with a good deal of sensitivity, even if the extent of Jesuit objectivity may remain a topic of discussion. As historian Joan-Pau Rubiés would put it, a Jesuit missionary report needed some embellished degree of spiritual enthusiasm for the success of missionary work, since wealthy devout Catholic Christians in Europe would have opened their pocketbooks to continue to financially support such endeavors. However, the Jesuits did not fling themselves headlong into realms of fantasy by making claims that would have insulted the intelligence of concerned audiences back at home; in such cases, audiences would have begun to distrust Jesuit letters (Rubiés 2012).

Given the limitations of what sources might reveal, it seems perfectly clear that the scholarly community would have strong views on the feasibility or practicality of a project that involves the dissection of Marina Pak’s life, a life that ultimately ended in the Philippines. The task of reconciling these viewpoints would seem patently impossible. On the other hand, no matter what they feel about the feasibility of extrapolating insights from fragmentary sources, scholars can agree on the fact that recent years have ushered in the introduction of various analytical techniques crafted by individuals who sincerely look for ways of analyzing fragmentary or incomplete sources from the distant past. Among these modern approaches, the history of emotions stands as a particularly noteworthy way of objectively assessing the interior consciousnesses of historical peoples. The scholar Daniela Saxer has argued for the centrality of the history of emotions as a tool in interpreting the past (Biess 2010). As cultural anthropologist William Reddy cogently argues, the history of emotions has also garnered considerable interest across many academic disciplines (Reddy 2001). The French historian Lucien Febvre reminds his readers about the moral imperative that scholars have in reflecting, even if provisionally and tentatively, on a past individual’s interior consciousness: “The truth is that any attempt to reconstitute the emotional life of a given period is a task that is at one and the same time extremely attractive and frightfully difficult. But so what? The historian has no right to desert (Febvre 1973)”. The history of emotions therefore provides a valuable tool for scholars who wish to reflect on the probable (but no more than that) spirituality of Marina Pak.

Having justified the lens of the history (more specifically the history of emotions), the scholar who wishes to study the life of Marina Pak can also explore the relevance of theology as a tool for uncovering the subtext of contemporary testimonies about her. Although some modern historians fiercely and passionately resist attempts to marry theology with history, the matrimony (a matrimony known as historical theology in academic circles) enjoys a deep wellspring of support among many scholars (Hauptman 1991). Theology’s rich interactivity with other disciplines means that the scholar has many possible avenues to delve into the texts relating to Marina Pak, but environmental theology offers promise because Marina’s forced relocations from the state of Joseon to Japan and finally to the Philippines naturally invite the reader to wonder about her interactions with the environment. As Valerie DeMarinis argues in her essay on the significance of forced migrations, “the moving of persons between cultural contexts means that there is a need to examine cultural values in acculturation situations, both for the individual and the host environment (DeMarinis 2013)”. More justifications for the validity of environmental theology come from scholar Brennan Hill, who emphasizes the fact that scholars ought to consider a person and that person’s environment as parts of a unified and coherent whole: “Most important, environmental theology acknowledges the interconnection among human life, other living things, and the earth itself (Brennan 1998)”. Environmental theology and missiology have a close relationship with each other because advocates of both disciplines understand the fact that even the most spiritually inclined human beings still have to feed and clothe themselves in the real world. Theologian Alan Richard Tippett defines missiological theory as having two parts: “theological, because the message is a word from God concerning His purpose for, and promise to mankind; anthropological because it has to be communicated within the structure and organization of human societies (Tippett 1987)”. In short, the interdisciplinary lens of theology provides a cornerstone for interpreting certain aspects of Marina Pak’s life in ways that arguably rise above mere speculation, but scholars cannot make the mistake of assuming that these interpretations carry the solidity of perfectly established and verifiable facts. The ministry of Marina Pak offers a laboratory setting in which scholars can practice the ever-evolving craft of tentatively interpreting a limited number of sources that substantially (if incompletely) describe aspects of her life.

3. Prelude to the Philippines: The Korean Context

The European Jesuits met Marina after her arrival in Japan during the ravages of the Imjin War (1592–1598). This circumstance may partly explain why scholars have very little to go on with respect to Marina’s life before her arrival in the archipelago. As demonstrated by the survival of a letter penned by Jesuit Gaspar Vilela, the Jesuits clearly had an interest in evangelizing the Korean peninsula as early as 1566. This interest aside, during the Imjin War, the Jesuits did not meaningfully interact with native Koreans based in the Korean peninsula, the Jesuit baptism of some Korean infants on Korean soil notwithstanding (Ruiz-de-Medina 1991). Because of this situation, the Jesuits never really had the chance to objectively learn about peacetime life or the everyday realities of that life in the Korean peninsula. As the Jesuits could only accompany Japanese soldiers through the permission of the authorities, the Japanese departure from the Korean peninsula ultimately marked the end of whatever hopes that the Jesuits might have had in wanting to spread the gospel in the peninsula.

Despite this lacuna of information on Marina’s life, an interesting fact does arise in Marina’s conversion to Catholic Christianity. She converted to the faith in 1606, about a decade after her initial arrival in Japan as a prisoner of war (Colín and Pastells 1902). Since the Jesuits found themselves conducting religious education classes for Korean converts as early as the 1590s, this delayed (or belated) path to conversion necessitates an explanation. Two explanations suggest themselves. In the first place, she might have simply served as a slave under a Japanese lord who did not want to have anything to do with the Christian faith that the Jesuits tried to propagate. That kind of servitude would have arguably lessened her chances of significant encounters with Korean Christians and European Jesuits in Japan. The second explanation offers an interesting possibility that hints at the durability of Joseon Dynasty traditions even in the face of unimaginable obstacles. Across the centuries, the resilience of the Korean peninsula’s domestic religious and philosophical beliefs has commanded the attention of academics. Even in the aftermath of the Goryeo Dynasty becoming a client state in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions (1231–1259) that forced countless Goryeo women to relocate as concubines and servant girls (among other job titles) to Yuan China, Goryeo women steadfastly retained a peculiarly Goryeo expression of Buddhism (Robinson 2009). Marina’s high-status Joseon background probably meant that her family would have taught her according to the Confucian values that prevailed in the Korean peninsula during the sixteenth century, although those Confucian values would have had silent echoes of a once prevalent Buddhist culture. On the other hand, the dominance of her Confucian background meant that others would have expected her to emphasize ideals of loyalty to the family and loyalty to the state. Later on, for the apologists of Joseon Confucianism, the existential crisis that beset the Joseon Dynasty during the Imjin War would intensify the state’s insistence on these values as ways of instilling pride in the motherland.

Unfortunately for the dynasty, during the Imjin War, pillars of Confucian virtue seemed patently lacking from one of the two genders. During the reign of Seonjo (r. 1567–1608), men seemed to care more about self-preservation and less about virtuous martyrdom in front of the frightening Japanese armies. For the date of 9 May 1592, chroniclers lamentably reported the “absence of an unwavering will to protect His Majesty (Annals of Seonjo 1592)”. Royal court members decided to simply run away from the Japanese army, thereby following the ignominy of their Goryeo-era predecessors, who had fled from the Mongols in the thirteenth century (Henthorn 1971). The timorousness of one gender meant that women lopsidedly carried the responsibility of personifying the values of obedience to the family, obedience to the ruler, and obedience to the kingdom. For women directly affected by the terror of Hideyoshi’s armies, this responsibility seemed to only have two outcomes. One option entailed the act of a woman killing herself to avoid ravishment at the hands of the Japanese; when the commander of Busan fell in battle, his despairing concubine committed suicide (Turnbull 2008). The other option entailed the act of a woman involuntarily acquiescing to enslavement and/or exile at the hands of the Japanese.

Even with the fragmentary nature of primary source testimonies on Marina’s life, scholars know that she chose servitude instead of suicide. In other words, Marina believed that the dictates of her Confucian conscience had told her that she could survive for the sake of preserving her rectitude and virtue, even in the midst of tremendous suffering and displacement from her homeland. In this respect (even if she herself did not realize it), she moved away from Neo-Confucianism’s emphasis on monarchical authority and returned to classical Confucian precepts that prioritized the supremacy of a properly cultivated and individual human conscience (Iraola 2007). Other Joseon women in Marina’s situation might have similarly felt that they could reconcile their definition of Confucian virtue with the tragedy of involuntary exile in an alien land. Time and time again, contemporaries would hotly debate the wisdom of Marina’s choice. After the Manchu Qing invasion of 1636–1637 that resulted in a Joseon crown prince going to China as a hostage, choices like the one that Marina made became centerpieces of a court debate. As recorded by the annals for 11 March 1638, one side of this debate believed in a policy of compassionate empathy for female war prisoners returning from abroad. The other side wanted to remove certain social options for returnees because Manchu foreigners had surely defiled the Joseon female prisoners (Annals of Injo 1638).

The fact that court bureaucrats hotly debated the propriety of Joseon female behaviors in captives involuntarily exiled abroad hinted at a philosophical environment in which not everyone in the Neo-Confucian camp agreed with each other on every possible issue. On the one hand, the very existence of these debates symbolized the ideological diversity found in Joseon Dynasty Neo-Confucians. On the other hand, these passionate and caustic debates also existed as evidence for the factionalism that essentially inveigled the dynasty almost continuously beginning in about 1575 (Wagner 1974). These debates necessarily arose from the intensely sophisticated nature of Neo-Confucianism itself, since Neo-Confucianism emerged in China’s Song Dynasty (960–1279) as a Confucian attempt to answer metaphysical questions that students of classical Confucianism could not fully address. Although the Neo-Confucians had to reluctantly accommodate the lingering presence of Buddhist influences during the transition from the Goryeo to the Joseon, the Neo-Confucian success in diminishing those influences ultimately meant that the Neo-Confucians really had no opposition aside from internal debates among themselves (Lancaster and Yu 2002). While not the originator of Neo-Confucianism, the Chinese scholar Zhu Xi (1130–1200) became closely identified with this revitalized brand of Confucianism because he systematically organized the viewpoints of various Neo-Confucian thinkers.

Zhu Xi’s viewpoints ultimately became the basis of the so-called Cheng-Zhu school of Neo-Confucianism, but Joseon scholars loudly and sometimes violently bickered among themselves over how to interpret those viewpoints. In his view of the metaphysical world, Zhu Xi believed in distinguishing between two fundamental yet indivisible realities, namely, the reality of principle (li) and the reality of material force (ch’i) (Yao 2000). At their essential foundations, the eternal and temporal worlds carried the reality of principle (li). The reality of principle (li) also carried the innate goodness of humankind. By way of contrast, the principle of material force (ch’i) determined [1] the shapes of things as well as [2] changes in the eternal and temporal worlds. On the other hand, as noted by the religious studies scholar Young-chan Ro, academics should not fall into the overly tidy mindset of viewing the reality of principle (li) and the reality of material force (ch’i) as parts of a dualistic belief system on par with the dichotomy between heavenly things and earthly things in Christianity (Ro 1989). Given Zhu Xi’s apparent preference for the cultivation of innate human virtue, he focused more on the reality of principle (li) and less on the reality of material force (ch’i); for Zhu Xi, material force interfered with man’s desire to actualize a human being’s innate goodness (Gardner 2003). Joseon thinkers Yi I (1536–1584; pen name: Yi Yulgok) and Yi Hwang (1501–1570; pen name: Toegye) famously differed in the interpretation of principle (li) and material force (ch’i). Yulgok appears to have favored the reality of material force (ch’i) as a basis for the moral reformation of society in a tangible manner. Toegye appears to have busied himself with the task of essentially trying to keep Neo-Confucian doctrines purified from what he perceived as the adulterating influences of Zen Buddhism, particularly since he believed that the Neo-Confucian contemplations of Chinese thinker Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529) seemed uncomfortably closer to Buddhism rather than Neo-Confucianism (Ro 1989). Today’s citizens of liberal democracies generally cherish ideological diversity and might honestly wonder why Joseon Dynasty officials sometimes violently clashed with each other over things that might seem esoteric and minor (Wagner 1974). On the other hand, the ideological disputes and factionalism that sometimes uncomfortably accompanied those disputes existed as genuine phenomena in the Joseon Dynasty. As demonstrated by the abovementioned incident from 1638, these debates could animate some officials to either sympathize with or vilify the plight of involuntary exiles like Marina. The passions with which the acolytes of Yulgok and Toegye could defend the interpretations of various luminaries could also arise in opinions on the supposed rectitude or moral failings of involuntarily exiled Joseon Dynasty ladies.

Marina felt that her sense of Confucian virtue had informed her decision to stay alive while submitting to Japanese custodianship, but her apparently steadfast Confucianism ironically provided the Jesuits with the opportunity that they needed. Jesuits clearly believed in the possibility of harnessing Marina’s Confucian conscience for the sake of attempts to convert her to Catholic Christianity, a faith in which one’s conscience remains supreme in all matters except for the Lord’s authority over humankind. The famous Jesuit and Sinophile Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) described Confucianism as based on the “virtuous training of the individual”, or in other words, the cultivation of one’s conscience (Rule 1968). Ricci’s colleagues in Japan viewed Marina as someone for whom the famous Jesuit missionary approach of accommodation could bear spiritual fruit. This reality remained true even if the Jesuits made certain adjustments to this policy in light of Marina’s female gender; she did not, after all, come from a male-dominated East Asian bureaucracy that would have needed more intellectual arguments to make the case for Catholic Christianity. At any rate, despite a conversion journey considerably longer (or later) than the journeys of some of her fellow kinspeople in Japan, Marina had become a full member of the Catholic Church by 1606.

4. Prelude to the Philippines: The Contexts of Japanese Law

Aside from Hideyoshi’s invasion, the Japanese state significantly influenced the destinies of Marina’s life with anti-Christian legislation beginning in 1587 with Hideyoshi’s “Limitation on the Propagation of Christianity” and “Expulsion of Missionaries”. Since the very first and presumably most significant section of “Limitation” left the decision of conversion to Christianity to the individual’s conscience, the decree technically did not exist as an outright ban on the faith. The relevant provisions of “Limitation” clearly showed Hideyoshi’s awareness of how some daimyō (Japan’s feudal lords) had become Christians, and so the decree existed as a de facto recognition of a Christian faith that already existed among visiting missionary priests as well as members of the land-owning Japanese aristocracy. On the other hand, the architects of “Limitation” strictly disallowed forced conversions of anyone serving as a retainer under a daimyō. No forcible conversions could happen among any farmers under the authority of an official who exercised any degree of local or regional authority (Lu 2005). The architects of “Limitation” evidently did not trust priests to exercise restraint in temptations to forcibly convert the Japanese or even behave as prudent foreign visitors, and indeed, during the Imjin War, whispers of a Catholic Christian conspiracy against the emperor caused some Japanese officials to distrust Jesuit missionaries accompanying the Japanese soldiers (Dallet 1874). In the “Expulsion of Missionaries” decree, the government reemphasized a legal reality already mentioned in the “Limitation” decree. This legal reality entailed the state’s beneficence in conferring lands that feudal lords or regional authorities could administer, but the state retained ultimate authority over those lands. With this assertion of national authority, the state formally disallowed Christian feudal lords and regional authorities from the practices of dedicating lands to the erection of houses of Christian worship; the state’s authority, in other words, outweighed the local autonomy of the lords. The architects of the “Expulsion” decree profoundly denounced priests as individuals who undermined the prevailing Buddhism of the Japanese state, and missionary priests received a formal order to leave Japan within twenty days (Lu 2005). The fact that Marina does not turn up as a Christian convert until 1606 further supports the theory that she might have initially lived as a servant or retainer in a non-Christian lord’s household in Japan, especially given the silence of Jesuit records on her prior to 1606. She probably lived as a retainer of a non-Christian lord for whom the “Expulsion” and “Limitation” decrees had practically no effect, since the provisions of those decrees did not apply to non-Christian lords exercising custody over retainers or vassals. On the other hand, scholars have called attention to the fact that these laws still affirmed the presence of Christianity in Japan and remained weakly executed by the authorities (Laver 2011; Elisonas 2005). The critical period of the 1614 persecutions had not yet come. Despite the restrictions of the 1587 decrees, conversions could and did happen, and scholars ought to consider Marina’s conversion to Christianity in 1606 in the context of the sociopolitical circumstances of those decrees. The silence of contemporary testimony regarding events in Marina’s life from 1606 to 1612 notwithstanding, she probably became catechized in the essentials of the faith. Her faith life apparently impressed the Jesuits so much that they invited her to join the group of Miyako no Bikuni, a collection of women who took vows that one could effectively describe as the vows of a de facto (if not de jure) Catholic Christian sisterhood.

5. The Spirituality of the Missionary Existence near the Pasig River: Unconscious Hints of a Former Korean Culture in Marina’s Life

Upon arrival in the Philippines, Marina Pak and her companions settled in a Jesuit accommodation near the Pasig River (Colín and Pastells 1902). Although historically-minded scholars have extensively commented on the everyday realities of life for the Miyako no Bikuni sisters effectively transplanted in the Philippine Islands, scholarship has paid less attention to the theological or spiritual implications of life near the Pasig River and how those implications might have played out in Marina’s spiritual life. While some of the earliest sixteenth-century Jesuits arriving in the Philippines sometimes had to travel to Manila by foot because of the absence of passable walkways that could accommodate wheeled transportation, the Pasig River quickened the pace of Jesuit boat travels. Perhaps, as one Jesuit academic imaginatively put it, the first Jesuits in the Philippines walked along the periodically flooded Filipino lands by channeling the spirit of Peter, who similarly walked on water to meet Jesus (De la Costa 1961). In the theological sense, the presence of a river in the Garden of Eden affirms the hand of God in the authorship of creation, and true followers of Jesus Christ can become vessels of God’s love when the scriptures metaphorically describe the hearts of these believers as overflowing with living water. On the other side of the theological equation, rivers also had apocalyptic connotations because of events such as the blood-filled Nile bringing destruction to the Egyptians and adulterated rivers that signify the Lord’s justice against those who would dare to desecrate His holy name (Ranken et al. 1998). In ways literal and spiritual, the Jesuits would have certainly recognized the ambiguous meanings of rivers, since a river could represent either a source of comfort or an obstacle that potentially hindered the movement of the missionaries. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), the founder of the Jesuits, personified the order’s imagination on rivers. According to his autobiography, he used a river as a landmark that could help him guide his travels, but the river’s depth intensified his fears of falling into that body of water (Ignatius of Loyola 1900). This ambiguity clearly remained true for a Jesuit house completed near the Pasig River in 1582, since the floor of the home lay a substantial distance above a ground dampened by one of the river’s shoreline openings (De la Costa 1961). Marina may have lacked the theological erudition of her Jesuit directors. On the other hand, she might have appreciated the constellation of restorative and destructive meanings associated with rivers, even if that insight probably came more from her Korean homeland and less from whatever training came to her from the Jesuits.

Although contemporary sources do not precisely indicate Marina’s feelings about the relevance of the Pasig River in her life, her Korean background may shed some light on the multifaceted piety that she would have introduced to life near that river, no matter what the Jesuit chroniclers wanted to say. Although not unique to the Korean peninsula in terms of worldwide narratives on religion, the phenomenon of religious pluralism in Korea has had a major role in the mutual influences between indigenous expressions of folk religiosity, shamanism, Daoism, Buddhism, and Christianity (Kim 2016). Despite the dynastic philosophical or religious affiliations of the peninsula’s various polities over time, the nominal existence of a national faith belied a constellation of diverse religious and philosophical expressions among the people. For centuries dating to at least the Three Kingdoms era, Confucianism and Buddhism had essentially enjoyed a more or less harmonious coexistence with one another, although Confucianism’s influence remained mostly restricted to the court, where the scholarly proclivities of Confucianism carried more prominence. These ecumenical tendencies aside, nothing of this spirit of cordiality between belief systems seems to have survived among the Korean converts—at least according to the Jesuit accounts. Jesuits described Korean converts who showed distinctly anti-Buddhist proclivities, as in the case of the court lady Maxima, who threw a Buddhist rosary in the face of a Buddhist monk in about 1614 (Ruiz-de-Medina 1991). Despite these apparent proclivities, one should read these accounts in the context of Jesuits who dismissively failed to find many redeeming aspects of Buddhism, as symbolized by Francis Xavier’s (1506–1552) disparaging comments on Buddhist monks (Xavier 1872). In other words, Jesuits who viewed East Asian conversions to Christianity as triumphs over supposedly immoral non-Christian beliefs would have remained unintentionally or intentionally silent on cases in which converts had some nostalgia (explicit or implicit) about previously held beliefs.

Despite all the rhetoric that Jesuits proclaimed about the fervent piety of the Korean converts, even the most passionately Christian converts could have unconsciously remained somewhat anchored to controlling assumptions of previously held beliefs. Given the reality of a religious pluralism that transcends time and place in Korean culture, some Koreans would have recognized Buddhism’s significance as a religion whose most ardent and sincere apologists played central roles in praying for the welfare of the state, regardless of the invectives heaped upon the Buddhists by most equally ardent Neo-Confucians (Kim 2012a). Through the centuries, Korean Buddhism’s interactive proclivities with other religions also allowed the faith expression to survive through adaptation, particularly through adaptations to geomancy. In the Korean peninsula, the idea of geomancy translates into pungsu-jiri (풍수지리), which Minsoo Kang has translated as “the science of wind, water, and land (Kang 1999)”. Geomancy, the Korean variety of Chinese feng shui, exists as a belief system that emphasizes the discovery of hidden knowledge or prophetic insights based on the geography of the land. Geomantic beliefs antedated the advent of Buddhism in the Korean peninsula, and indeed, the peninsula’s indigenous systems of folk religiosity had rich geomantic flavors. Geomantic themes flowed through the very words of folktales related to the Three Kingdoms era. One such folktale described the Silla capital city of Gyeongju as a bird that needed water in the eyes of a geomancer (Choi 1958). These kinds of local geomantic narratives served as constituent pieces of a broader narrative that described the entire Korean peninsula as a creature that needed the nourishment of nature’s bounty. The Buddhists ultimately appropriated this understanding for the sake of the faith’s survival over the centuries (Hwang 2019). Hong-key Yoon, a scholar of Korea’s encounters with geomancy, has called attention to the fact that the people of the Korean peninsula viewed forests, natural bodies of water, naturally elevated lands, and swamplands as creations of nature and therefore outside the prerogative of private ownership (Yoon 2017).

On the other hand, certain Joseon Dynasty encounters between Confucianism and geomancy sometimes occurred in somewhat less favorable circumstances. During the early decades of the dynasty, an increasingly Confucianized government sought to regulate geomantic practices because popular desires for geographically favorable burial sites led to the depletion of lands that the government would have wanted to use for other purposes. The government therefore tried to prevent the spread of geomancy theories propagated by individuals viewed by the state as improperly trained. Proper justifications for geomantic practices would henceforth come from China, the birthplace of Confucian values (Deuchler 1992). Although Confucians could not completely muzzle the supposed abuses of geomantic practitioners, the Confucians seem to have contented themselves with the regulation of geomantic practices.

The degree to which Marina Pak could have knowingly or unknowingly retained residual Buddhist influences in her life in the Philippines ultimately depends on two questions, namely, the level of literacy that Marina Pak had in her life and the nature of the Buddhism that still lingered in the Joseon kingdom. Although scholars acknowledge increasing literacy rates among women in the final half of the Joseon Dynasty, the same scholars agree on the reality of low or close-to-nonexistent instances of literacy among even aristocratic women in the first half of that dynasty. In the first half of the Joseon Dynasty, rare exceptions notwithstanding, women had not yet internalized the notion of literacy as a necessity to everyday life (Choi 2000; Han 2004; Brock 2020). Given these academic consensuses, the Doctrine School of Buddhism probably did not resonate with Marina very much, given the school’s emphasis on the scholarly ability to read and interpret Buddhist texts. During Marina’s time, the continuing decline of Buddhist influence at the national level also meant that Buddhists essentially had to retreat from the immensely powerful symbolism of carrying a strong presence in the royal court. Buddhists, in short, had to sustain their existence by trying to appeal to less educated people in the countryside (Lancaster and Yu 2002).

On the other hand, one should refrain from simplistically viewing Buddhist practitioners of this time as individuals who despaired over the survival of the faith in the Korean peninsula. If Marina Pak and other women of her time internalized anything about the Buddhist religion that technically antedated the advent of Neo-Confucianism, then the credit for that successful internalization would have partly rested on those Buddhist practitioners. While the Buddhists certainly knew that they could no longer enjoy prominence at the highest levels of court life, the vanguard of Buddhism’s staunchest defenders elaborated on the virtues of the Seon (known as Zen in Japan) Meditation School of Buddhism. Over the course of the entire Joseon Dynasty, the Meditation School would ultimately supersede the Doctrine School in prominence. One of the more famous Buddhist contemporaries of Marina Pak came in the person of Hyujeong (1520–1604), a monk who vigorously espoused the Seon Meditation School. In one of his most famous works (Speculum on the Seon School), Hyujeong called for the meditating practitioner to refrain from improper desires, remain temperate in behavior, and never become upset. Hyujeong admonished practitioners who would only meditate to publicly flaunt the faith, and he also had unflattering words for clerics who seemed to care more about the material honors of the state (Kim 2012b).

Although scholars lack the precise documentation necessary to retrace all the nuances of Marina’s philosophical and spiritual path from Confucianism/Buddhism to Christianity, Marina’s Korean cultural heritage would have never simply disappeared without a trace, even if one takes the fervency of her Christian conversion into account. If anything of Marina’s old Confucian/Buddhist heritage had unconsciously survived her conversion, then her piety would have become at least partly informed by environmental considerations conceived in the crucible of not only her faith, but also the geomantic and Buddhist influences that unconsciously remained within her life. In the abovementioned folktale about the Silla capital city as a bird that needed water, the theme of a city dependent on food, clothing, and shelter remained starkly apparent. The survival of Unified Silla civilization, to say nothing of the high culture implicit in that civilization and majestically symbolized by the capital city, depended on fertile crops nourished by rivers. In other words, the cosmopolitan status of Korean civilization remained virtually inseparable from the nourishments of Mother Nature—a point upon which geomancy’s advocates and Buddhists would have converged.

An analogous situation would have persisted in the Pasig River, a space that would have served the needs of indigenous Filipino folk religionists, European missionaries, and non-European converts to Christianity, among other protagonists involved in the formative encounters between Christians and natives of the Philippine Islands. The historical chronicles clearly indicate the festive occasions that typically surrounded the arrival of Jesuit missionaries in the Philippines. These festivities existed as popular signs of gratitude for the Lord’s providence, particularly since Jesuits had to endure long hardships in vessels for the sake of arriving in the islands, and especially since fate could never guarantee the survival of the missionaries on such arduous voyages. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, upon arrival, the Jesuit missionaries would have taken boats down the Pasig River for the fastest passage to Manila. On the other hand, the Pasig River also represented a boundary partly around which Santiago De Vera, Spanish governor of the Philippines from 1584 to 1590, built a ditch to facilitate the transportation of construction materials. Marina arrived in the Philippines after De Vera’s governorship had ended, but she would have witnessed the legacy that he left behind, namely, the replacement of many wooden buildings with stone buildings (De la Costa 1961). With her own background of having lived in a civilization whose Buddhist and geomantic edifices promoted the indispensability of rivers, Marina would have seen the Pasig River as the sine qua non that guaranteed Jesuit activity in the Philippines; she would have found a supremely eminent significance in this river. As one scholar put it, a river offers a majesty absolutely without parallel in a world otherwise governed by the banality of human civilization and the limitations of that civilization. The divergence between the power of nature and the fragility of human endeavors would have seemed patently obvious to Marina in the early seventeenth century (Francis 2019). Even if Marina did not or would not say so, the geomantic and Buddhist echoes of her past in the religious diversity of her Korean homeland could have surely informed her assessment.

Marina’s thoughts about life in the Pasig River did not remain confined to her arguable wonder over the body of water as an incubator for the Jesuit missionary society. She too would have shared in some understanding of the ambiguity of water as a nurturer and destroyer of hope, although one may debate the extent to which the Jesuits had Christianized that understanding. Marina would have also brought her traumatic experiences with water to her life near the Pasig River. Fortunately for students who wish to uncover concrete details of Marina’s life, the scarce primary source materials bring up one specific instance of this trauma. In Japan, shortly before Marina and her Miyako no Bikuni sisters found themselves exiled to the Philippines in 1614, the Japanese authorities had torched several houses of Christian worship and placed the ladies inside sacks. The state’s representatives hoped that the ladies would lament over having symbolically and physically forfeited the trappings of earlier lives as relatively well-to-do people; Naitō Julia (c. 1566–1627), the foundress of the Miyako no Bikuni, had in fact once served as an abbess for a Japanese Buddhist monastery. When the sack treatment did not work, the authorities turned to vigorous attempts at individually convincing the ladies to apostatize, but to no avail. Then, when it became clear that Marina and her companions would not renounce the faith, the authorities resorted to physical punishment by stripping the ladies and leaving the believers to shiver in the wintry cold, snow, and ice. When the women still refused to abandon their shared faith, the local governor sent soldiers with a threat to bring the Christians to a whorehouse. This threat panicked the women (Ruiz-de-Medina 1991). At this point, the story had clearly transitioned from a heroic display of faith to the prospect of trauma. As members of the Miyako no Bikuni, these women had promised their chastity, poverty, and obedience for the sake of honoring a divine order. The snow and ice that had once existed as a symbolic and solemn confirmation of Marina’s faith (for adverse weather apparently could not cause her to renounce the faith) had now become the first stage of a process that would culminate in a whorehouse. As Marina sought to navigate the joyful and disheartening realities of living near the Pasig River, memories of this trauma from Japan would have never seemed out of reach in her faith-informed mind.

6. The Last Stage of Marina’s Life in the Philippines: The Ecstasy of an Encounter with (the Already Deceased) Miyako no Bikuni Foundress Naitō Julia

Towards the end of her life in the Philippines, Marina’s interior contemplations miraculously allowed her to meet the late Miyako no Bikuni foundress Naitō Julia. Despite many years of failing eyesight, Marina appears to have neither despaired nor complained very much. The frailties of Marina’s physical eyesight arguably meant that Marina could live as someone more open to more meaningful spiritual gifts, namely, the gift of seeing things in the interiority of Christian spirituality. Marina happily told her servant Monica about a resplendent and beautifully clad Julia coming to approach the Miyako no Bikuni’s sole Korean member (Colín and Pastells 1902). Contemporary scholars who acknowledge Marina’s life either remain silent on this episode or cursorily mention the event without further comment (De Sousa 2019; Ward 2009).

In the first place, the presence of Marina’s servant (Monica) in Marina’s meeting with Julia would have counted as a remarkable thing, signifying the extent to which the Jesuits accommodated East Asian culture and that culture’s emphasis on preserving appearances in the aristocracy. After all, the Jesuits clearly would have played a role in making sure that Marina had a Christian servant. A considerable amount of scholarship surrounds the success of the Jesuits in attempting to reconcile European Christian values with East Asian norms, with Jesuit missionaries famously dressing up in the apparel of Chinese aristocrats to gain the favor of the Chinese emperor. On the other hand, debate persists on the motivations behind Jesuit accommodation. For some scholars, the Jesuits accommodated non-Christian cultures out of a sincere love for the uniqueness of those cultures; for other scholars, Jesuit accommodation merely existed as a provincially conceived means to an end, namely, the fulfillment of Jesus Christ’s Great Commission in evangelizing the earth (Abé 2011; Anderson 2007; Morrison 2002; Randall 2011). Broad scholarly agreement exists on the reality of accommodation itself. In contemporary Europe, the presence of servants among nuns sometimes constituted a dilemma for Catholic Christians. The vocation of the Catholic sisterhood implied a voluntary departure from the earthly comforts of the secular world. Those earthly comforts would have included servants at the beck and call of the aristocracy. Such a notion notwithstanding, the calling to abandon the trappings of earthly wealth did not equally resonate with all cloistered women, as demonstrated by certain sixteenth-century Carmelite nuns who still had servants. This ostentation contravened the rigor and discipline that any reasonable contemporary Catholic Christian would have expected of the Carmelite order (Donnelly 1995). On the other hand, this kind of contradiction did not bother the Jesuits tasked with the spiritual care of Marina and Monica. Any debates on the contradictions inherent in having a servant-girl alongside a Korean woman supposedly consecrated to chastity, poverty, and obedience seem to have escaped the attention of the Jesuits in the Philippines. Among Korean converts in the 1590s and 1600s, Jesuits cultivated the faith of servant-girls, thereby emphasizing the extent to which Jesuits maintained a ministry of converting souls while still outwardly respecting the East Asian social hierarchy that those women served (Ruiz-de-Medina 1991).

One should acknowledge the fact that Monica lived as Marina’s servant in a world of East Asian souls involuntarily exiled from East Asia. In the Philippines, the Miyako no Bikuni now lived far away from the physical clutches of the stiff hierarchy of Japanese society. No pressure would have existed for the order to preserve even the faintest semblance of deference to notions of Japanese social hierarchies. Korean Christians under the care of Jesuits had long accustomed themselves to notions of a faith-based exile, whether that exile happened in one’s mind or in the actual decision to physically separate oneself from the secular Japanese authorities (Ruiz-de-Medina 1991). In this life of exile from Japan, the use of the Japanese language would have likely remained among the few things that the (exclusively Japanese with the exception of Marina) sisters would have deliberately chosen to preserve, but the continued use of that language would have maintained the fellowship that the women had among themselves (Ward 2009). Additionally, in considering the relationship between Monica and Marina in the Philippines, one must also keep another reality in mind. Monica’s existence as Marina’s servant would have almost assuredly existed as more of a de jure than a de facto reality. The evidence clearly indicates that the humble and faithful Marina never had a hint of temptations in arrogantly lording over Monica. The absence of evidence of any prideful displays on Marina Pak’s side almost definitively serves as evidence for the absence of such prideful displays (Colín and Pastells 1902).

Marina’s encounter with Julia also reveals the degree of intimacy that the all but blind Marina felt for Julia. Marina joined the Miyako no Bikuni order in 1612 and found herself exiled to Manila in 1614, so Marina and Julia spent about thirteen years together before Julia died in 1627. The few scholars who have directly written about Marina Pak essentially describe her life in the context of the contemplative and spiritual activities of the Miyako no Bikuni (De Sousa 2019; Ruiz-de-Medina 1987; Ward 2009). Scholarship has remained silent on arguably the most obvious aspect of Marina’s relationship with Julia, namely, the cross-cultural nature of that relationship. If Marina and Julia met for the first time upon Marina’s admission into the sisterhood in 1612, then two years of this relationship would have unfolded in Japan, a nation where the shared tribulations and trials between the two women would have crystallized the sympathy and solidarity that the two would have felt for each other. Given the relative peace from persecution that Julia and Marina enjoyed from the Japanese authorities upon the Miyako no Bikuni’s arrival in Manila, the two women would have found the time to more quietly develop a relationship, especially with the degree of what Ruiz-de-Medina describes as the “acceptable normality” of life in the Philippines (Ruiz-de-Medina 1987; De Sousa 2019). However, the fact that Marina came from the Korean race would have remained a part of her for her entire life. Others would have never failed to notice Marina’s Korean ethnicity, especially since she never quite learned to fluently speak the Japanese language (Colín and Pastells 1902).

Additionally, even if Marina could not use fluent Japanese to reveal the deepest stirrings of her heart to Julia, Marina’s mere presence in Julia’s religious life would have powerfully testified to God’s power in allowing the gifts of faith, hope, and love to transcend the historical distrust that technically separated the Korean and Japanese people. In her years in the Korean peninsula, Marina probably heard frightening stories of Japanese pirate raids that traumatized and devastated the lives of her countrymen (Boxer 1967). The obvious fact of thousands of Joseon citizens hauled to Japan as slaves also indicated the lack of respect that the Japanese had for the Koreans. Marina’s presence turned an otherwise almost exclusively Japanese female group into a multinational group, and the sisters would have endeavored to create an ecclesial community that, despite different geographic origins, collaboratively rejoiced in the love of Jesus Christ. Since Marina described the vision of her foundress Julia as marvelous to behold, the Korean lady would have surely seen God’s grace as a phenomenon that extended to His children across all times and all localities (Colín and Pastells 1902). Through the eyes of faith, Marina had spiritually beheld her foundress Julia in an all but perfect and idealized form. If this vision could come to Marina while she resided in the temporal world, then the Jesuits probably reasoned that an even more perfect gift of restored vision would surely come to Marina in the eternal world. The Jesuits clearly showed confidence in their ability to supposedly view the interior spirituality of certain Christian converts. In one instance of this confidence, the Jesuits described the deaf seventeenth-century Korean convert Manuel as a person capable of differentiating the lives of Christians from the lives of non-believers (Ruiz-de-Medina 1991). Whether or not that confidence accurately reflected the reality of the situation, of course, remains a matter of debate. For the Jesuits, the fact that Marina faithfully recounted this vision to her servant Monica essentially affirmed the former’s confidence in the anticipation of the heavenly kingdom. On the other hand, this confidence may reveal more about the spirituality of the Jesuits and less about the interior spirituality of Marina herself.

Until Marina received the heavenly crown that rewarded her piety, she had to interact with Julia (on Earth) through a tenuous grasp of the Japanese language, and Marina’s decision surely testified to a piety that transcended tensions between the Japanese and Korean races. Given the reality of life alongside a community of Japanese exiles in the Philippines, one can simply explain Marina’s decision to use Japanese as a necessity created by circumstances. However, a more potentially fruitful line of inquiry rests in the fact that Marina, like other Korean Christians in Japan, had a profound desire to confess her sins in the Japanese language, which the most skilled Jesuit linguists had mastered. As the Jesuits observed, linguistic similarities between the Japanese and Korean languages apparently facilitated the task of Korean Christians who wanted to comfortably share details of spiritual lives with the Jesuits (Ruiz-de-Medina 1991).

7. Conclusions

Despite Juan Ruiz-de-Medina’s highly flattering treatment of Marina Pak as the first ordained sister of Korean origin, the sobering truth about Marina’s life rests in the fact that she arguably counted as a minor figure even within the already peripheralized exiled Korean Christian community that found itself scattered across Asia. In comparison to the scarce primary source testimonies related to Marina, the Jesuit accounts have far more to say about Korean Catholic Christian martyrs such as Ōta Julia and Kaun Vincente (Ruiz-de-Medina 1991). On the other hand, for scholars, the value of Marina Pak’s life rests in the reality of how she personified the eclectic religious background of her Joseon nation. Whether she explicitly acknowledged it or not, the constellation of Confucian and Buddhist influences that she carried into her life as an exiled Korean Christian would have profoundly shaped the destinies of her Christian faith in both Japan as well as the Philippines. Reflections on Marina’s Joseon background and her involuntary sojourn in Japan necessarily precede any discussions of her life in the Philippines.

As a member of the Confucian aristocracy of her Joseon homeland, Marina had to fulfill solemn vocations of filial piety, but the crisis of the Imjin War and the moral frailties exhibited by the royal court’s timorous males would have intensified the pressure for Joseon ladies to exist as paragons of Neo-Confucian virtue. Although Marina might have contemplated the option of committing suicide to protect her honor from a life of enslavement at the hands of the Japanese, she chose to survive and bear the trauma of involuntary exile from her familiar Joseon world. As amply demonstrated by contemporary court debates on the moral character of exiled Korean women returning from imprisonment in foreign nations, this fateful decision ensured Marina’s relegation to the periphery of Joseon society. Additionally, Marina’s affirmation of the supremacy of her conscience as the moral compass of her life meant that she had not only reverted (even if unknowingly) to a classical Chinese interpretation of Confucianism, but also potentially opened herself up to a conversion to the faith that would fix the destinies of her earthly days. Hideyoshi’s “Limitation on the Propagation of Christianity” and “Expulsion of Missionaries” decrees likely had little practical effect on the life of Marina’s Japanese master, since the master probably did not have the Christian faith and the decrees only applied to Christians. The gravity of the language of these decrees notwithstanding, Marina arguably took advantage of the weak enforcement of these decrees by relying on her conscience in converting to the faith by 1606 and ultimately joining the Jesuit-inspired Miyako no Bikuni in 1612.

Marina’s life in the Philippines unfolded in the Pasig River, a river that physically and spiritually encapsulated notions of ambiguity. The Jesuits keenly understood the duality of a river as both a nurturer and an obstructor of life, and one can only imagine the depth of spirituality that the Jesuits and Marina would have felt while traveling and living near the Pasig River. Through the vicissitudes of Ignatius’s life, the Jesuits would have reconciled physical impressions of the Pasig River with spiritual affirmations of [1] the Lord’s majesty in creating the river; [2] the Lord’s grace in using humans (overflowing with the water of life) as vessels of faith, hope, and love; and [3] the Lord’s use of adulterated rivers for the sake of justice against the unjust. The extent to which Marina would have also understood these theological realities remains more or less open to debate. An alternative reading of Marina’s life near the Pasig River arguably emphasizes the centrality of her eclectic religious background, a background that the Jesuit chroniclers either could not or would not dignify. Given the biases inherent in Jesuit chronicles, Jesuit attempts to use the chronicles of anti-Buddhist Korean Christian converts as examples of typical Korean Christian piety deserve a considerable degree of skepticism. Even if Marina never explicitly or knowingly acknowledged the vestigial remnants of Korean belief systems in her life, she probably understood Buddhist and geomantic notions of how her Korean homeland metaphorically and mystically existed as a creature that needed the care and love of nature. Just as rivers guaranteed the flourishing and cosmopolitan nature of the Korean kingdom, so too did the Pasig River serve as the one indispensable antecedent of the Jesuit mission in the Philippines. No matter what governor Santiago De Vera did in beautifying the man-made structures around the Pasig River, Marina would have remained deeply and profoundly aware of the fragility of human civilization near the river, and Buddhist/geomantic ruminations on the significance of rivers might have silently remained in her outlook. One cannot therefore completely discount the possibility of Marina using the external signs, if not the implicit theological content, of Buddhist and geomantic ideas in reflecting on the Pasig River. In her contemplations on life near the Pasig River, Marina would have also brought her traumatic experiences with water, particularly an episode that began with nearly naked Miyako no Bikuni women shivering in the Japanese snow and ended with the horrendous possibility of defilement in a public whorehouse. The last significant act of Marina’s life in the Philippines happened with her interior vision of Naitō Julia, and this episode has remained relatively unnoticed by current scholarship. Even if one concedes to the reality of Monica as a servant in name only to Marina, Monica’s existence in Marina’s life silently testifies to Jesuit preferences on accommodating East Asian notions of hierarchical delicacy. Marina’s vision would have also affirmed the depth of relations that existed between herself and the foundress of the Miyako no Bikuni. The simple fact of this relationship would have surely testified to the power of a cross-cultural relationship that transcended the pettiness of distrust that might have existed between any other pair of Japanese and Korean individuals, but as a person trained in the Catholic Christian faith, Marina might have relied on the religion that taught her about the supranational mercy and blessings of the Lord.

The author hopes that this study on Marina Pak’s life on the Philippines opens up research avenues through which scholars can explore the lives of other involuntarily exiled Korean Christians. Despite unavoidable and obvious lacunae in primary source data, explorations of more obscure figures in Korean Christians active during Japan’s Christian Century will provide even more clarity about the ways in which these Christians sought to spiritually, emotionally, and practically navigate the realities of moving between diversities of national, philosophical, and religious identities. Before the so-called advent of established Korean Catholicism in the Joseon state in 1784, Korean Christians across Asia manifestly lived in an alternative space of Catholic Christianity. In this space, these Koreans simultaneously lived as part of their Korean homelands and yet also apart from those same Korean homelands. In this sense, diasporic studies on the involuntarily exiled Korean Christians may help South Korean Christians to more properly situate themselves in Korean Christianity’s family tree. This family tree supposedly begins in 1784, but it historically and theologically extends to times and places outside the tidy mindsets of Korean Christians either unable or unwilling to acknowledge the significance of Korea’s pre-1784 Korean Catholic communities. On the other side of the equation, Christians in the Philippines can pardonably feel a degree of pride in knowing that their homeland offered a comparative measure of peace and safety for Marina Pak, who ultimately met her Creator in a land that she surely never foresaw as her final port of life.