The history of Christianity in Japan is a tangled one.
In the southern Kyushu city of Kagoshima, with the iconic smoking peak of the Sakurajima volcano in the distance, stands a lonely plaque marking the spot where famed Jesuit priest St. Francis Xavier came ashore in 1549 to lead some of the first formal missionary work in Japan. He quickly fell in love with the country and its people, extolling them as “the best who have as yet been discovered”, and insisted that Japan had the greatest potential as a centre for Christianity in all Asia.
What followed is what has been referred to as ‘the Christian century’. Christianity spread like wildfire across Japan, and churches and seminaries were established throughout the country. Japan was a country divided at this time, torn by internecine warfare between various fiefdoms and their samurai armies. This worked in the missionaries’ favour, as they established not only churches but also helped merchants broker trade deals and supply arms to the warring samurai.
In the port city of Nagasaki, more than 200 miles from Kagoshima, lies another notable monument, but of a very different sort, heralding the end of this golden century for Christians in Japan. It’s the Monument to the Twenty-Six Martyrs, an eerie tribute to a mixed group of Japanese and European Christians who were crucified and executed in 1597, in an early effort to set an example to other Christians who refused to recant their faith. The youngest among them was a boy of 12.
By 1600 Japan had unified under what came to be known as the Tokugawa Shogunate, and the more that the shoguns learned about Christianity and the West, the more unsettled they became. They learned about the incessant warfare and political struggles between Protestants, Catholics, and other iterations of Christianity in Europe, and as representatives of these rival faiths arrived in Japan the shoguns worried about the impact of such struggles on a country they had just barely managed to stitch together. More ominously, the more they studied the global political situation, the more they realized that Christian missionaries were almost inevitably followed wherever they went by European armies of colonization.
The shoguns began restricting the activity of Christian priests, eventually banning Christianity altogether. The response — proliferation of underground missionary work throughout the country, and the occasional eruption of armed Christian rebellions against local authorities — confirmed their fears, and in the 1630s the shoguns decided to cut off contact with the Western world entirely. With the exception of a small and tightly-controlled Dutch trading mission (maintained in part so the shoguns could keep an eye on the West; this was famously depicted in David Mitchell’s 2010 novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet) Europeans were banned from the shores of Japan on pain of death. That was the situation until 1853, when contact and trade between Japan and the West was officially re-established.
During the intervening 200 years Christianity didn’t disappear entirely. Christian families and entire communities in Japan maintained their faith in secret, passing it down over the generations. Christian symbols (crosses, images of Mary) were often disguised as Buddhist ritual items. Christian rituals and sacraments were secretly held, and Latin prayers passed on, sometimes becoming garbled over the generations. These ‘hidden Christians’, as they have come to be known, were occasionally found out and caught by the authorities; Christianity remained officially illegal in Japan until 1873.
Sometimes they would be punished leniently, but more frequently tortured or executed with repressive brutality. In all cases, they would have to ‘apostatize’, or renounce their Christian faith publicly. Authorities held on to special Christian icons specifically for this purpose: captured Christians would have to stomp or spit on crosses and images of Jesus or Mary, uttering insults toward them and other recantations of their faith.
In the 1850s, when European Christians once more set foot on Japan for the first time in centuries, both they and Japanese authorities alike were shocked with the emergence of tens of thousands of hidden Christians, who had passed on their faith secretly over the centuries. Some of these practitioners rejoined the Catholic Church, while others remained separate and distinct; their practice of Christianity having deviated and transformed itself significantly as it was transmitted secretly from generation to generation across the centuries.
Such is the backdrop against which Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence was written. Originally published in 1966 — it was awarded the prestigious Tanizaki Prize that year — it follows the journey of a Portuguese Jesuit priest, Father Rodrigues who, together with his fellow missionary Father Garrpe, undertakes a secret mission to Japan in the early 1600s. Their goals are twofold: to find and support the Christian underground which they assume must still exist and, on a personal level, to learn the fate of their former teacher, Father Ferreira. Ferreira, who had been preaching in Japan and supporting the underground Christians, had disappeared and news spread that he had been captured and apostatized. Not willing to believe their mentor would do such a thing, Rodrigues and Garrpe determine to seek the truth.
The award-winning author himself was a rarity: a Japanese who had been baptized Catholic as a young child in the ’30s. He didn’t give his faith much serious thought until he traveled to Europe as a student following World War II. There, he realized the extent to which nearly 2,000 years of Christianity had infused every aspect of European history and culture. It underscored for him how distinct Christianity was in Europe compared to Japan, whose culture had been shaped by millennia of the indigenous, polytheistic and animistic Shinto faith, as well as centuries of the Buddhism which had been imported from China. Christianity had barely impacted Japanese culture and society at all, by comparison.
His European experiences led him to wonder whether Christianity was compatible with Japan (and Asia more broadly) at all. Christian faith — even if taken as reflecting a universal spiritual truth, which he as a Christian believed — had been shaped by 2,000 years of dialogue with European culture. So when it arrived in Asia, how much of that supposed universal truth had been retained? How much reflected not the purported spiritual truth of Christianity, but the cultural values and ideas of Europeans? What did it mean when Japanese adopted Christianity? Did the interpretation of Christianity by Japanese converts reflect the same faith as that understood by western Christians? Or was it a different form of Christianity, indelibly affected by the heritage and context of Japanese culture?
Such questions obsessed Endo, and feature in much of his literature. He traveled to Palestine, and even wrote a biographical Life of Jesus in which he sought to “dewesternize” Christianity by extracting and exploring the elements of Jesus’ life and teaching he felt would resonate strongly in Asia. As he explained in that book, “The religious mentality of the Japanese is — just as it was at the time when the people accepted Buddhism — responsive to one who ‘suffers with us’ and who ‘allows for our weakness’, but their mentality has little tolerance for any kind of transcendent being who judges humans harshly, then punishes them. In brief, the Japanese tend to seek in their gods and buddhas a warm-hearted mother rather than a stern father. With this fact always in mind I tried not so much to depict God in the father-image that tends to characterize Christianity, but rather to depict the kind-hearted maternal aspect of God revealed to us in the personality of Jesus.”
Metaphors, Missionaries, and Martyrs
As one of Japan’s preeminent 20th century novelists and men of letters, Endo deployed a variety of metaphors to describe the challenge of Christianity in Japan, and two of them appear prominently in Silence. One is that of Japan as a swamp. As one of the Christian missionaries who has apostatized and rejected Christianity states: “This country is a swamp… This country is a more terrible swamp than you can imagine. Whenever you plant a sapling in this swamp the roots begin to rot; the leaves grow yellow and wither. And we have planted the sapling of Christianity in this swamp.”
Later, in a powerful scene, a Japanese inquisitor reassures an apostatized Christian priest: “Father, you were not defeated by me… You were defeated by this swamp of Japan.”
Of this famous ‘mudswamp’ metaphor Endo later stated “This is a reflection of my own doubts formed during my stay in France as to whether Western culture… can ever truly take root when planted in Japan.”
The other metaphor is that of Japan as a spider’s web. States an apostate priest:
But in the churches we built throughout this country the Japanese were not praying to the Christian God. They twisted God to their own way of thinking in a way we can never imagine… That is not God. It is like a butterfly caught in a spider’s web. At first it is certainly a butterfly, but the next day only the externals, the wings and the trunk, are those of a butterfly; it has lost its true reality and has become a skeleton. In Japan our God is just like that butterfly caught in the spider’s web: only the exterior form of God remains, but it has already become a skeleton.
The value of Christian missionary work comes under scrutiny in the book, as well. During the period in which the novel is set, Christianity has been outlawed for some years, but still scattered teams of Christian missionaries, like that of the central character Father Rodrigues, come ashore in the hopes of secretly helping the underground Christians keep their faith alive. Whenever such missionaries are captured, the Japanese inquisitors quiz them on how they can reconcile their missionary work with the outcomes it produces. Don’t the missionaries realize that by converting Japanese to Christianity, they are dooming those converts to hideous torture and death when they are inevitably caught? If the purpose of being a priest is to help people and to do good in the community, how is this accomplished by encouraging people to adopt a faith that will only bring suffering down on their families and communities?
Holding ‘True’ to Faith
In another metaphor, which will be less appreciated among contemporary readers, Endo likens this missionary work to “the love of an ugly woman”; or the unrequited love of a suitor (Endo deploys the metaphor in a particularly sexist sense) who refuses to give up trying to persuade the other person to love them, despite the increasing pain and disharmony this causes. The conundrum is illustrated most powerfully in the scenes depicted by Endo of missionaries facing the dilemma of whether to hold true to their faith or apostatize.
But what does ‘holding true’ to their faith even mean? When Japanese peasants are tortured and killed because of the priests’ missionary work, does that work remain holy? When priests refuse to apostatize and their converts are tortured and killed as punishment to entice the priest to give in, what is the Christian truly to do in such a situation? Is it an affirmation of faith to refuse to apostatize? Or is it selfishness, a willingness to sacrifice others to secure his own eternal salvation? Would Christ have apostatized, in order to alleviate the suffering of tortured peasants?
These questions are presaged even more directly in an earlier work by Endo, the short literary essay ‘Araki Thomas’, featured in Endo’s collection Foreign Studies. In this, he explores the life of another Japanese apostate, Araki Thomas, who studied in Rome before returning to Japan to face persecution and torture. Although the facts of Thomas’ life are scarce, Endo argues that when Thomas, a native Japanese, arrived in Rome around the year 1600 he struggled with the rigid perception people had of him as a martyr-in-waiting. They praised him as a courageous and brilliant foreigner, but as one who would inevitably return to martyrdom in Japan. Never did they consider that he might pursue any other fate, such as staying in Europe.
He fulfilled their expectations in the end, returning to his home country and going underground to assist the persecuted faith. But Endo argues that even before his capture (and subsequent apostasy under torture) Thomas grew cynical about the Christian mission, witnessing the suffering inflicted by authorities on Japanese peasants as a result of the defiant work of European missionaries. “At about this time Araki came to compare the Japanese Christians who had been ensnared by the ideals of the missionaries to the image he retained of himself when he had been in Rome. Recalling his life as a student studying abroad — a life in which he had found himself totally cramped by the need to stand up straight and conform to the dreams of others — he must have wished to call out, “That’s enough! Leave me alone! Don’t try and force your ideas on the Japanese!”
It is this dilemma that Endo explores in much greater length and powerful detail in the novel Silence.
Engaging, Fast-paced, and Deeply Psychological
Silence offers a riveting narrative framed in delicately powerful prose, replete with moving depictions of Japan’s natural beauty and the difficult lives of its peasants. The story of the missionaries on their adventure is an engaging one that pulls in the reader, and the theological debates that emerge as the narrative unfolds are provocative and intellectually stimulating.
It’s a powerful psychological novel, impressive also in its depictions of the personalities involved. The faith and doubts of the missionaries will resonate even with a secular readership, and the Japanese authorities who lead the persecution of the Christians are depicted as cruel and authoritarian — as indeed they were, torturing and massacring tens of thousands of converts — but also convey a compelling intelligence in the conviction that what they are doing is for the best for their country. Written long before postcolonial theory was in vogue, the dialogues reflect a keen familiarity with the issues provoked by the colonial project of missionary work and the engagement between East and West.
Other characters are rich and compelling, too: the Japanese apostate Kichijiro, who struggles to come to terms with his own ‘weakness’ and the question of whether one who betrays other Christians is also worthy of God’s love and forgiveness; the apostate missionary who’s filled with guilt at the suffering his missionary work caused and is now determined to atone for it to the Japanese people, even if it means betraying other missionaries and; the Japanese soldiers who carry out the cruel persecution of Christians yet appear to harbour no personal ill-will: “this guard did not possess any aristocratic cruelty; rather it was the cruelty of a low-class fellow toward beasts and animals weaker than himself… This fellow had not the slightest idea of the suffering that would be inflicted on others because of his conduct. It was this kind of fellow who had killed that man whose face was the best and the most beautiful that ever one could dream of.” Here Endo compares the Japanese samurai with the Roman centurians who crucified Jesus, but the image also hearkens to mind the soldiers of World War II — which had ended barely 20 years before the novel was written — and the careless cruelty inflicted by those who are ‘only following orders’.
Film director Martin Scorsese — who is currently finishing up a film adaptation of the novel, scheduled to be released later this year — highlights another interesting aspect of the novel. In a foreword Scorsese wrote for the newest reprinting of this classic, he argues that the power of the novel lies in its focus on the dilemma of Judas. Judas, the disciple who supposedly betrayed Jesus to the Romans, features as a prominent presence in the novel, as a metaphor for the constant threat of betrayal. “Endo looks at the problem of Judas more directly than any other artist I know,” says Scorsese. “He understood that, in order for Christianity to live, to adapt itself to other cultures and historical moments, it needs not just the figure of Christ but the figure of Judas as well.”
In the end, Endo seems to have retained his own faith. In his introduction to the collection Foreign Studies he writes, “I am now convinced that meaningful communication between East and West is possible. I have gradually come to realize that, despite the mutual distance and the cultural and linguistic differences that clearly exist in the conscious sphere, the two hold much in common at the unconscious level.” But he remained keenly aware, in his work and in his personal life, of the differences between Christianity in Europe and in Japan.
Europeans — many of whom can relate to and understand Christianity even if they are not practicing Christians — have the support of centuries of cultural history to reinforce the practice of their faith; Christianity and Christian values have infused many of Europe’s institutions, values and practices. In Japan, however, Christians have no such institutional and cultural support to rely on, rendering Christian identity a much more difficult experience. Endo referred to this as “the peculiar cross that God has given to the Japanese.” He is aware, too, of the need for European Christians to be open to the new forms Christianity would need to adopt as it spreads outside of Europe. Europeans don’t have a monopoly on the purported ‘truth’ that Christianity offers to its believers, seems to be his message, and need to be more open to that fact and to the fact that the faith must change as its context changes. As Endo stated in a lengthy reflection quoted by translator William Johnston in his preface:
But after all it seems to me that Catholicism is not a solo, but a symphony… If I have trust in Catholicism, it is because I find in it much more possibility than in any other religion for presenting the full symphony of humanity… And unless there is in that symphony a part that corresponds to Japan’s mud swamp, it cannot be a true religion. What exactly this part is — that is what I want to find out.
Johnston goes on to argue that this message has meaning not only for Japan’s Christians, but for Christians the world over. “For if Hellenistic Christianity does not fit Japan, neither does it (in the opinion of many) suit the modern West; if the notion of God has to be rethought for Japan (as this novel constantly stresses), so has it to be rethought for the modern West; if the ear of Japan is eager to catch a new strain in the vast symphony, the ear of the West is no less attentive — searching for new chords that will correspond to its awakening sensibilities. All in all, the ideas of Mr. Endo are acutely topical and universal.”
Johnston originally wrote that almost 50 years ago, but his point still hits home. Whether the reader’s interest lies in debates surrounding Christian faith, or in questions of cultural dialogue between East and West, Silence remains a moving, provocative, and powerful novel that enraptures the reader today as much as when it was first published.
Topical, Universal, and Ready for the Big Screen
Fans awaiting the big-screen release have had to exercise the patience of a saint themselves. Scorsese, who became fixated by the book when he read it 20 years ago (“I’ve reread it countless times since… It has given me a kind of sustenance that I have found in only a very few works of art,” he writes in the foreword), has been talking about the film since at least 2009. Consistently delayed to make room for the famous director’s other projects (and subjected to a lawsuit in 2012 stemming from the delays), among the actors who had been earmarked for the key role of Father Rodrigues were Daniel Day-Lewis and Benicio del Toro. Ken Watanabe had been slated for the role of interpreter for the Jesuit priest, but had to bow out due to scheduling conflicts, replaced by Tadanobu Asano. In the end, Andrew Garfield (The Amazing Spider-Man) was picked for the role of Rodrigues, with Adam Driver (Star Wars: The Force Awakens as his fellow Jesuit missionary Father Garrpe. Other notable cast members include Liam Neeson as the apostate Father Ferreira, and Japanese actor-director Shinya Tsukamoto, Yosuke Kubozuka and actor-comedian Issey Ogata (The Sun).
The film is scheduled for release later this year.