Katekisama is a sixteenth-century wooden sculpture of Erasmus of Rotterdam, today held at the National Museum in Tokyo. The sculpture was attached to the stern of the De Liefde, the first Dutch ship to land in Japan in 1600, and was later kept for centuries in a Buddhist monastery—its origin forgotten and its meaning repeatedly reinterpreted, at times as a Chinese god, a bogeyman, or a missionary. As a global hybrid and travelling object, Katekisama symbolizes intellectual exchange and the innovative, unifying power of universities over the longue durée, pointing toward a path of humanitarian universalism across borders. 

Katekisama is also the namesake of the Institute’s Katekisama Program, which—together with partners at the University of Bonn—promotes new directions in academic cooperation and a renewed understanding of academic education by treating knowledge as part of the global commons, the essential resources that will shape the twenty-first century.

The discussion following the talk was particularly stimulating, ranging from micro and global-historical approaches in the discipline to questions of material culture, early modern global networks, and the changing cultural lives of collection objects.