SOURCE: Netland, John T. “Encountering Christ in Shusaku Endo's Mudswamp of Japan.” In Christian Encounters with the Other, Edited by John C. Hawley, pp. 166-81. New York, New York: New York University Press, 1998.

[In the following essay, Netland examines the ways Endō addresses the clash of Western ideology and Japanese culture in his historical novels.]

The history of Christianity in Japan offers an instructive example of how difficult multicultural rapprochement can be. In spite of a Christian presence for over 400 years, Christianity remains an overwhelmingly miniscule piece of Japan's religious mosaic, its adherents amounting to little more than one percent of the population. Explanations for this phenomenon demonstrate part of the cultural impasse which has made Christianity so problematic in Japan. A Christian reading of this history might frame the narrative as a simple tale of persecution and resistance by a cynical political order which saw the foreign religion as a threat to its power. On the other hand, a Japanese reading of this history might frame it as a story of an undesired western ideology that could never be successfully imposed on a culture so ill-suited to it.

Both readings concede that the history of Christianity in Japan has been a less than successful venture. It began auspiciously enough. St. Francis Xavier landed in Kagoshima in 1549, introducing Christianity to Japan where it flourished for the rest of the century. The Christian mission, however, never did entirely shed its western cultural and political trappings and therefore courted suspicion of its political allegiances. Finally, in 1614, the Shogun Ieyasu reversed previous policies of toleration by issuing his Edict of Expulsion, which set the stage for a brutal persecution of Christians and in the process cut off Japan from the west for over two centuries.¹

Actually, neither Europe nor Japan was at that time very conducive to a depoliticized, cross-cultural dialogue. For most of the sixteenth century, Europe was dealing with the political repercussions of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, complex movements in which religious polemic became enmeshed in the commercial and political interests of most European nations. These interests followed the maritime powers on their voyages around the world. Both the European Catholic missionaries and merchants often dragged their old world disputes into their relations with the Japanese authorities, lending credence to suspicions that the religious mission of the Church might merely mask political reorientation, transforming Japanese society from its feudal parochialism into an ambitious modern nation organized around the centralized military authority of the shogun. One result of this political transformation was to make the stability of the state the preeminent social objective, sanctioned even by the Japanese religions, which emphasized obligations to the social order. Christianity, however, insisted that ultimate allegiances belong to God rather than to the secular state. The Japanese authorities thus began to feel that “Christianity was a disease which infected their subjects with disloyalty” (Elison 3). The Edict of Expulsion had accused Christians of seeking “to make Japan into ‘their own possession’ … [and] to ‘contravene governmental regulations, traduce Shinto, calumniate the True Law, destroy righteousness, corrupt goodness’—in short, to subvert the native Japanese, the Buddhist, and the Confucian foundations of the social order” (Elisonas 367).

It is within this historical setting that the distinguished Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo works out the multicultural implications of his Christian faith. Thoroughly Japanese, persistently Catholic, he has had to reconcile what he calls “a Japanese and a Western (Christian) self” (Endo, qtd. Higgins 415). Likening his baptism at the age of eleven to the forced imposition of a “‘ready-made suit,’ a Western suit, ill-matched to his Japanese body,” Endo seeks in his fiction to reshape “the Western suit into a Japanese kimono” (Higgins 416). This tension between Japanese culture and Christian faith is most pronounced in his historical fiction, with its imaginative retelling of crucial episodes from the history of Christianity in Japan. Silence is set in the fierce persecution initiated by Ieyasu, while The Samurai recounts an obscure, seventeenth-century Japanese trade mission to the New World. These historical novels, written eleven years apart, frame Endo's attempt to reconcile Christianity and Japanese culture.

To some extent the history of Christianity in Japan seems to confirm a central tenet of post-colonial theories, that virtually all European dealings with other cultures are masks for the political exercise of power. Postcolonial theories, by definition, take their frame of reference from the troubled history of western colonialism. They often lament the suppression of indigenous cultures and honor the silenced victims of imperialism. Beyond the colonial context, other strains of multiculturalism give voice to peoples whose histories have been muted within the dominant discourses of European and North American cultures. Central to these approaches is the desire to understand these cultures on their own terms, apart from the intellectual paradigms presumably imposed upon them by Euro-American cultures. This theoretical reorienting of cultural history owes much to Edward Said's Orientalism, which documents the European imperial imagination and its inscription of an Oriental “otherness” onto such cultures. Orientalism is for Said “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient …, a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (3). Travel narratives, linguistic and anthropological scholarship, missionary activities, the popularization of “Oriental” fashions and motifs—all are deeply implicated in power structures of an expansive European civilization whose every relationship with the “Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony” (Said 5).

While Said's paradigm has considerable relevance for nineteenth-century Europe, when the balance of power decidedly favored Europe, the historical context of the early Christian mission to Japan reveals a crucial difference. While the exercise of power is certainly present in that context, it is not the story of a hegemonic, colonial power imposing its will upon a powerless people. Japan has never been colonized by the west, nor was the cross implanted on Japanese soil by force. Rather, secular power has generally been the prerogative of the Japanese state. That difference is crucial for our understanding of Endo's historical fiction. While these novels honestly portray the often troubling relationship of religion and power, they resist the reductionism of attributing this complicity solely to western hegemony. Instead they portray a radically Christian alternative to the worst impulses of both eastern and western political ambition. In so doing, they hint at a divine order that both acknowledges and transcends cultural particularity.

Silence tells the story of Father Sebastian Rodrigues, a fictional 17th-century Jesuit missionary, who is drawn to Japan by a combination of spiritual fervor, romantic idealism, and curiosity about the alleged apostasy of his seminary instructor, Father Christovao Ferreira. In spite of his idealism, Rodrigues's apostasy seems inevitable virtually from his arrival in Japan. He has come to assume the mantle of the heroic martyr, to lay down his life for the Church. His early meditative reveries, in the tradition of Ignatian meditation, are heavily laden with western iconic ideals—Christ as benevolent conqueror, Christ as King, Christ as the Good Shepherd. Little by little, that idealism gives way under the relentlessly de-romanticized suffering he sees. He witnesses the horrifyingly banal deaths of Japanese Christians, whose martyrdoms scarcely disturb the oppressive silence of the natural order. His longing to hear the voice of God and to see the Gospel triumph in Japan gradually dissipates in the face of a relentless silence, a silence dramatically broken when Rodrigues himself apostatizes.

Beyond the universal theme of faith and doubt, the novel problematizes the historical confrontation of East and West during the seventeenth-century, a confrontation the Japanese authorities characterize as undesired aggression. The magistrate Inoue crudely likens the Christian missionaries to an importunate woman. “Father,” he says, “I want you to think over two things this old man has told you. One is that the persistent affection of an ugly woman is an intolerable burden for a man; the other, that a barren woman should not become a wife” (Silence 124). His interpreter accuses Rodrigues of wanting “to impose [his] selfish dream upon Japan” (Silence 134). In arguing that the Christian faith is a selfish religious ideal, undesired by and ill-suited to Japanese society, these authorities reduce the Christian mission to the discourses of power.

Conspicuously absent from that argument is any reference to the respective truth claims of Christianity and Japanese religions, an absence that calls attention to profoundly different cultural sensibilities about the nature and place of truth in religious expression. For the Christian missionary, the imperative to preach the Gospel is based on particular claims about the nature of God, the created order, and the human condition. Call it dogmatic or propositional, the Christian faith is based on absolutist claims about the person of Jesus Christ, claims which do not offer much middle ground between belief and disbelief. Such is the understanding of the faith that Father Rodrigues proclaims. During his interrogation, Rodrigues consistently defends his faith by appealing to universal truth. Interestingly, the interpreter willingly accepts the challenge. Having “learned Christian doctrine in the seminary,” the interpreter is eager to refute western misunderstandings of Buddhism and to turn the metaphysical problem of evil against the Christian world view. Yet Father Rodrigues holds his own, eventually making the interpreter angrily change the subject. It is a contest whose rules reflect the Christian worldview and which plays to the rhetorical strengths of the priest. The interpreter has accepted the standard of truth to settle questions of competing religious claims, and his angry dismissal of the argument at the end indicates that he knows he has not refuted Christianity on rational grounds.

On the other hand, Inoue demonstrates his Japanese religious sensibilities in quietly displacing universal truth claims with a more pragmatic and particularist notion of truth. “Father,” he quietly insists, “we are not disputing about the right and wrong of your doctrine. In Spain and Portugal and such countries it may be true. The reason we have outlawed Christianity in Japan is that, after deep and earnest consideration, we find its teaching of no value for the Japan of today” (Silence 108). Rodrigues responds again with a compelling defense of universality: “It is precisely because truth is common to all countries and all times that we call it truth. If a true doctrine were not true alike in Portugal and Japan we could not call it ‘true” (Silence 109). Inoue merely nods in polite acquiescence, never disputing the priest's defense of universality, and Rodrigues begins to believe that he is “winning the controversy.” But though his defense of universal truth is never refuted, he does not win anything, for the debate about truth is virtually irrelevant to Inoue's pragmatic particularism. In the abyss separating the religious sensibilities of the sixteenth-century Japanese from the European Christian, there is virtually no common ground, other than the exercise of power, on which to adjudicate competing religious claims. Christian appeals to reason, evidence, and truth claims mean little to the Japanese state intent on establishing its political stability. The religious debate is simply a pretext for the exercise of power, a power designed to eradicate the otherness of Christianity from penetrating a homogenous Japanese culture.

In pressuring Rodrigues to apostatize, Inoue refrains from direct refutation, opting instead to undermine Christianity by manipulating its very ideals. Far more insidious than the threat of unspeakable tortures is the nagging suspicion—suggested by the apostate Ferreira and brilliantly exploited by Inoue—that Japanese culture inevitably subverts Christianity from within. Ferreira presents himself to the imprisoned Rodrigues as “an old missionary defeated by missionary work,” convinced that the Christian “religion does not take root in this country” (Silence 146). It is he who introduces the swamp metaphor that implies an incompatibility of east and west: “This country is a swamp. … Whenever you plant a sapling in this swamp the roots begin to rot. … And we have planted the sapling of Christianity in this swamp” (Silence 147). Inoue adds, “The Christianity you brought to Japan has changed its form and has become a strange thing. … Japan is that kind of country; it can't be helped” (Silence 188). Ferreira's apostasy is based on a grudging acquiescence to Inoue's cultural particularity, the belief that eastern and western cultures are fundamentally incompatible and that the Christian Gospel is too culture-bound to be adaptable to the swamp of Japan. Ferreira's defeatism is thus more disturbing to Rodrigues than is Inoue's persecution, for while the latter does little to deny the claims of Christianity (persecution, after all, confirms a prominent Scriptural theme), the former undermines the Christian claim to universality. It challenges the trans-cultural normativity of Christianity, suggesting instead that Japanese culture inevitably syncretizes and hence distorts Christianity.

This clash of Christian faith and Japanese culture is prominent throughout the novel. Rodrigues frequently wonders about the cultural barriers to Christianity and is troubled by the excessive veneration the Japanese have for the icons (Silence 45). Later, while marveling at the cunning of Inoue's plan to make the Christians spit on the crucifix and declare the Blessed Virgin a whore, he worries that the “peasants sometimes seem to honor Mary rather than Christ” (Silence 56). These are not idle concerns, for such excesses of a proper Catholic veneration suggest an eclectic blend of Shinto animism and Christianity, raising troubling questions about whether such eclecticism assures cultural relevance or undermines Christianity's integrity. Language barriers, too, create problems for the missionaries. Rodrigues recalls Xavier's linguistic problem of confusing Deus with Dainichi, “the sun which the people of this country had revered for many generations” (Silence 70). Ferreira concludes that this linguistic confusion in fact reveals a profound irreconcilability between Christianity and the Japanese mind:

From the beginning those same Japanese who confused ‘Deus’ and ‘Dainichi’ twisted and changed our God and began to create something different. Even when the confusion of vocabulary disappeared the twisting and changing secretly continued. Even in the glorious missionary period you mentioned the Japanese did not believe in the Christian God but in their own distortion.

(Silence 148)²

The view that Christianity has been co-opted by the swamp of Japan is reinforced by Inoue's strategy to make Rodrigues apostatize. Were Rodrigues given the choice of apostasy or his own life, he likely would choose martyrdom over apostasy. But Inoue does not give him that choice. Rather, the priest is asked to apostatize to save the lives of the Japanese Christians hanging in the pit. A brilliant strategy, this choice appeals directly to Rodrigues's Christian love and sense of mission. Throughout his time in Japan, he frequently questions whether he has accomplished anything beyond merely troubling the Japanese Christians: “He had come to this country to lay down his life for other men, but instead of that the Japanese were laying down their lives one by one for him” (Silence 133). The night before the apostasy takes place, he is grieved by “his inability to love these people as Christ had loved them” (Silence 158). His nagging fear that he is not useful to others is exploited by Ferreira, who proclaims defensively that he, at least, is still useful to others even as an apostate. To Rodrigues, then, the command to apostatize comes not primarily as an invitation to escape suffering, but paradoxically as an appeal to his deepest Christian values. What is more Christ-like than to lay down one's life for others? Certainly the apostasy means a death to his public life of service to God, a life more precious to him than anything he can imagine. This strategy of appealing to Rodrigues's Christian virtues is rendered explicit when Ferreira tells him, “Certainly Christ would have apostatized for them. … You are now going to perform the most painful act of love that has ever been performed” (Silence 169-70).

This manipulation of Christian virtues on behalf of a nationalistic strategy to eradicate the faith seems to confirm Inoue's contention that Japan inevitably changes Christianity. Yet Endo is not content to give Inoue or Ferreira the last word. It is not, finally, Ferreira who leads Rodrigues to trample on the fumie. It is the emaciated Christ in the bronze image who breaks the silence and cries out to Rodrigues's heart: “Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men's pain that I carried my cross” (Silence 171). The apparent defeat of Christianity by the mudswamp of Japan ironically validates the very Kingdom it seeks to destroy. It is the moral authority of the suffering Christ that confirms Rodrigues's act, as if to say that the topsy-turvy Kingdom of God, in which the first are last and the last first, can take even Inoue's cynical manipulation of Christian ideals and use it to keep the spark of faith flickering.

Jean Higgins sees Silence as a transitional novel for Endo, indicating “the end of confrontation and the beginning of reconciliation” between Christianity and Japanese culture (417). This transition is signalled by the transformation of the “Rodrigues of the West” into the “Rodrigues of the East.” The former constantly recurs to images of “the risen Christ, serene in conquest; a Christ of glory, whose example calls for heroism in his followers …” while the latter is drawn to the “weak and powerless Christ who shows himself understanding of the weak, who has compassion with the betrayer” (Higgins 421). By framing this transformation as the displacement of a Western for an Eastern paradigm of spirituality, Higgins may be overstating its cultural dimension, for Christ's identification with the dispossessed surely belongs to western spirituality as well. Nevertheless, it is true that Rodrigues consistently imagines Christ in terms of western iconography—until the emaciated image of the bronze Christ stares up at him in its eastern starkness. This transformation of Rodrigues's religious imagination, from the idealized portraits of Christ as shepherd and king to Christ as fellow sufferer, suggests less of a displacement of west with east than a diminishment of all cultural particularity. Van C. Gessel notes that “the faith of Rodrigues and his companions has to be stripped of its cultural trappings before they can comprehend the true nature of Christ” (447). The effect is to present an image of Christ stripped of the triumphalism of western Christianity, thus bringing the central—and universal—themes of the Gospel into sharper focus. It is a conversion that negates rather than affirms the cultural particularity of either east or west, leaving the cross-cultural tension, in Gessel's words, in “a tentative truce,” a “struggle in which there can be no victors” (447). Although it is not uniquely eastern, the concluding affirmation of faith presents Christianity in terms that Endo believes to be culturally comprehensible to the Japanese: “The religious mentality of the Japanese is … 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” (Endo, Life of Jesus 1). This image of a fellow sufferer resonates with the Japanese psyche, perhaps because it is free of any offensive cultural overtones of western triumphalism.

The narrative ends with the paradoxical affirmation of faith in the two most unlikely characters: an apostate priest hearing the confession of the betrayer, Kichijiro. Rodrigues reflects that even if this improper administration of the sacrament “was betraying [his fellow priests], he was not betraying his Lord. He loved him now in a different way from before. Everything that had taken place until now had been necessary to bring him to this love. ‘Even now I am the last priest in this land. But Our Lord was not silent. Even if he had been silent, my life until this day would have spoken of him’” (Silence 191). But these expressions of faith involve cultural losses. Kichijiro, the ignoble coward, remains a social pariah without a place in his community. Rodrigues, too, affirms a private faith that comes in the wake of his giving up the only cultural expression of Christianity he has ever known. Gone forever is his place in the institutional Church, his vocation as priest, and even his national identity, now that he has been given a Japanese name and family. Left unanswered is the troubling question of whether the ecclesiastical institutions Rodrigues has forsaken can ever be adapted to Japanese culture or whether they are too intrinsically embedded in western culture to be a viable mediator of Christian faith in Japan.

If Silence offers only a tentative reconciliation of Christ and culture, The Samurai testifies in a more confident voice to the power of the suffering, rejected Christ not only to transcend cultural differences but to even to affirm elements of both cultures. The context of this novel differs significantly from that in Silence. For one thing, the cross-cultural setting is reversed, with a Japanese delegation of trade envoys journeying to the Christianized West. Gessel calls the novel “a remarkably faithful account of a voyage to Mexico and Europe undertaken in 1613 by envoys of the powerful Sendai daimyo Date Masamune” (445). In the novel the Japanese delegation consists of thirty-eight merchants in addition to the four low-ranking samurai who function as the official ambassadors—Hasekura, Nishi, Tanaka, and Matsuki. Guiding the Japanese is a Franciscan missionary, Father Velasco, whose spiritual zeal is exceeded only by his dubious ambition “to be appointed Bishop of Japan so that he may win the hearts of the Japanese people” (Gessel 445).

In spite of their samurai status, the four envoys share the burden of genteel poverty, their destitute family fortunes compelling them to accept the mission. Tanaka tells Hasekura: “I didn't take on this mission because I was ordered to by the Council of Elders. I took it because I wanted to get back our old fief at Nihonmatsu” (The Samurai 148). Hasekura, too, has been made vague promises by the Council of Elders about disputed family lands should the mission succeed. The merchants, on the other hand, simply have one objective in mind—to open up lucrative trade opportunities with the west. They thoroughly live down to Inaze Nitobe's contemptuous depiction of an amoral merchant class, particularly in their eagerness to convert to Christianity in order to sell their wares.³

The delegation is sent first to Nueva España, where it seeks to negotiate with the secular rulers in Mexico City. It is there that Velasco's machinations begin in earnest. Convinced that parading a group of converts from a field notoriously resistant to conversion would bolster his standing in the Church, and persuading the merchants that their economic goals could be thereby advanced, Velasco produces a group conversion in the chapel of the Franciscan monastery. Blithely untroubled by professing Christ in order to serve Mammon, the merchants return to Japan, enriched by the fruits of their conversion. At this point, the envoys split up. Matsuki presciently suspects that this mission masks ulterior purposes, and he chooses pragmatically to seek his political fortunes back in Japan, while the other envoys continue the mission. Rebuffed by the Viceroy in Mexico City, they are persuaded by Velasco to proceed to Spain where he promises an audience with the King. This promise, too, proves hollow. Driven to desperation, they finally succumb to Velasco's persistent entreaties and convert to Christianity, hoping that this action will grant them a sympathetic audience before their last resort, the Council of Bishops in Madrid. Nevertheless, the mission fails, and the group returns to an altered political situation in Japan. The Shogun has expelled the Christians and is ruthlessly crushing political dissent.

The conversions create the central dramatic and ethical tensions in the novel. Except for the young idealist Nishi, none of the group shows genuine interest in Christianity. Tanaka and Hasekura are caught in a complicated cultural dilemma. They have been told that their mission is of utmost importance and are given enormous latitude to accomplish it:

“In the land of foreigners,” Lord Shiraishi added abruptly, “the ways of life will probably be different from those here in Japan. You must not cling to Japanese customs if they stand in the way of your mission. If that which is white in Japan is black in the foreign lands, consider it black. Even if you remain unconvinced in your heart, you must wear a look of acquiescence on your face.”

(The Samurai 49)

This invitation from his lord surely would seem to justify an expedient conversion. Yet, as Nitobe points out, Bushido expected more from the samurai than from the merchants. “Lying or equivocation were deemed equally cowardly. The bushi held that his high social position demanded a loftier standard of veracity than that of the tradesman” (Nitobe 62). In addition, one of the cardinal samurai virtues, giri, “meant duty, pure and simple,” the duty owed “to parents, to superiors, to inferiors, to society at large” (25). Whether that duty in this case meant—as Tanaka believed—the absolute obligation to recover his family lands whatever the cost, or whether that obligation demanded fidelity to the culture and religious institutions of his community remains ambiguous. As Nitobe points out, the obligation of the samurai is not just to the immediate community, but also “a higher sense of responsibility to his ancestors and to Heaven” (38). Hasekura recognizes this responsibility: “To become a Christian was to betray the marshland. … So long as the Hasekura house continued, the samurai's deceased father and grandfather would be a part of the marshland. Those dead souls would not permit him to become a Christian” (The Samurai 160). For Hasekura, converting to Christianity could hardly be a mere matter of form. As it turns out, Tanaka's and Hasekura's conversions eventually cost them their lives, Tanaka through the samurai recourse to seppuku (ritual suicide) and Hasekura through Christian martyrdom. What was entered into as a mere formality becomes, in the eyes of the Shogun's court, a genuine conversion, for which Hasekura must die. But it is not just this political betrayal that creates a “Christian” out of Hasekura, for very much in spite of his will he comes to believe in the Christ whom he has previously despised. Though the betrayal triggers his identification with Christ, Hasekura's journey to Christian faith proceeds not outside of, but very much within, his cultural landscape.

Like Silence, this novel explores cultural differences. The Japanese samurai, who have lived in parochial isolation, react both with suspicion and sympathy to the immensity of western civilization. The young samurai, Nishi, responds to his companion's question as to whether he will convert by commenting on how much this trip has expanded his vistas:

“I don't know. I'll have to give it a lot of thought as we travel to Madrid. But on this journey I've realized how huge the world is. I've learned that the nations of Europe surpass Japan in wealth and grandeur. That's why I'd like to learn their languages. I don't think we can simply close our eyes to the beliefs of all of the people in this vast world.”

(The Samurai 148)

Whereas in Silence much of the cross-cultural debate is used by the authorities to argue that Christianity is ill-suited to Japanese society, The Samurai turns that cross-cultural dynamic around by associating Japanese homogeneity with parochialism. Nishi represents that enthusiastic idealism which sees cultural difference not as something to fear, but as a beckoning horizon to explore.

At the same time, the novel is hardly an apology for the west, nor even for Christian missions. Setting the novel in the New World allows Endo to critique the Church's sorry complicity in imperial conquest. A renegade priest in Mexico tells the envoys,

“Atrocious things happened here in Nueva España before the padres came. The foreigners snatched away the lands of these Indians and drove them from their homes. Many were brutally murdered; the survivors were sold into slavery. … The padres who came to this country later on have forgotten the many sufferings of the Indian people. … They pretend that nothing ever happened. They feign ignorance, and in seemingly sincere tones preach God's mercy and God's love. That's what disgusted me.”

(120)

Having seen what he has of this exploitation and distrusting Velasco's opportunism, Matsuki undoubtedly speaks for the group when he pleads with Velasco to leave Japan alone. “The happiness you padres preach is poison to Japan. That has been very clear to me since we arrived in Nueva España. This country would have lived in peace if the Spanish ships had not come. Your version of happiness has disrupted this country” (The Samurai 112-13). This echo of Inoue's anti-Christian polemic in Silence gains in credibility given that it is corroborated by the history of Nueva España.

But the novel is not primarily about the Church's moral culpability. The indictment of Christianity's complicity in imperialism is not used by Endo to dismiss categorically the Church or the West, for both eastern and western political ambitions are sharply undermined in The Samurai. Velasco remains unsympathetic for most of the novel, his shameless opportunism tainting his rare moments of self-reflective honesty. Likewise, the Tokugawa regime is equally indicted for its cynical exploitation of the samurai Hasekura, whose only sin has been an unwavering fidelity to his mission. It turns out that Matsuki is right: the mission is a ruse, the envoys unsuspecting decoys in the Shogun's geopolitical ambitions. He explains to his erstwhile mates:

“Edo [present-day Tokyo] and our domain never had trade with Nueva España as their main object. … Edo used our domain to find out how to build and sail the great ships. … That's why they didn't choose qualified people as envoys. Instead they appointed low-ranking lance-corporals who could die or rot anywhere along the way and no one would care.”

(The Samurai 236)

Although it is the samurai's lot to follow his lord's will even to death, the Shogunate's cynical exploitation of the envoys shows greater kinship with Machiavelli than with Bushido. Nitobe explains that the obligations between lord and retainer are not entirely one-sided. The ruler must not only earn the respect of his subjects, he is also “a father to his subjects, whom Heaven entrusted to his care” (Nitobe 38). He is obliged to demonstrate benevolence, without which the feudal relationship “could easily degenerate into militarism … [and] despotism of the worst kind” (37).

Where then does Christ fit into this cynical world of political ambition? For the two main characters, Hasekura and Velasco, it is through the demise of their worldly ambitions—the betrayal of Hasekura's loyalty and the crumbling of Velasco's schemes—that they come to a genuine encounter with Christ. Martyrdom demonstrates in Velasco that final conversion of self-interest to the selfless pursuit of Christ's kingdom. Hasekura's betrayal makes him reconsider his antipathy toward the “wretched, emasculated figure” he has previously despised (The Samurai 84). The thought of worshipping this man once filled him with shame. He could “detect nothing sublime or holy in a man as wretched and powerless as this” (The Samurai 160). Only when he has been condemned to death as an expedient scapegoat for the political regime does he begin to empathize with the despised and rejected Christ. Even before he is willing to declare himself a believer, he tells his servant, Yozo, of his newfound appreciation for Christ:

“I suppose that somewhere in the hearts of men, there's a yearning for someone who will be with you throughout your life, someone who will never betray you, never leave you—even it that someone is just a sick, mangy dog. That man became just such a miserable dog for the sake of mankind.”

(The Samurai 245)

Before being led off to his final interrogation before the Council of Elders, Hasekura has another moment with Yozo, who haltingly reminds his master that there is one who “will be beside you. … He will attend you” (262). With an emphatic nod of his head, Hasekura concurs as he sets off to meet that One. Gessel concludes that these affirmations of faith demonstrate a further development in Endo's reconciliation of cultural differences. Neither east nor west triumphs, but both are validated:

Velasco, once he has cast off his unseemly pride, is allowed to worship and serve his image of a glorified Christ with a rational and aggressive faith. Captured when he returns to Japan following Hasekura's death, Velasco is burned at the stake; his martyr's death becomes an unsullied reflection of his dynamic, Western beliefs. Hasekura, by contrast, accepts the companionship of Jesus almost passively. His faith is primarily nonrational and thoroughly internalized. … Endo in Samurai grants both men a place in the eternal mansions of heaven.

(Gessel 447-48)

If the cultural conflict between Christianity and Japanese culture has been diminished in this novel, as Gessel suggests, one reason for this reconciliation may well be that culture figures positively as well as negatively in Hasekura's conversion. Throughout the novel, Endo draws the reader's attention to comparisons between the samurai relationship between lord and retainer and the relationship of the Christian disciple to Christ. Velasco marvels at the “bonds in this relationship that go beyond mere personal interest,” the “almost familial sense of love.” This cultural relationship inspires the veteran missionary that he “must serve God the way these Japanese retainers serve their lords” (The Samurai 134). It is also this samurai relationship which, when breached by Hasekura's superiors, draws Hasekura to an identification with One whose loyalty is beyond question. A deep longing for the kind of companionship and reciprocated loyalty that Bushido affirms characterizes Hasekura's newly-found appreciation for Jesus.⁴ Hasekura never makes a dogmatic profession of faith, his faith in Christ remaining largely nonrational. What he does articulate about Christ often retains Buddhist overtones. For instance, we are told that the samurai has discovered “the desperate karma of man,” above which “hung that ugly, emaciated figure with his arms and legs nailed to a cross, and his head dangling limply down” (The Samurai 245-46). Just before he meets the Council of Elders, he considers his situation in language with a decidedly Buddhist flavor: “Everything had been decided from the outset; he was simply running along predetermined tracks. Falling into a dark, empty void” (262). Hasekura's non-dogmatic faith hardly resolves the doctrinal conflicts between Christianity and Japanese culture, but Endo has always been more interested in dramatizing the human experience of faith than in doctrinal precision. In this novel he dramatizes the conversion of a simple Japanese warrior who comes to Christ in the only way that makes sense to him.

In both novels, Endo explores the complicated relations of Christ and culture. Endo acknowledges that Christianity cannot entirely escape its cultural inscription, and in Silence he wonders whether Christianity can take root in the mudswamp of Japan without being radically neutered of institutional and cultural norms. In that respect, Silence never entirely answers Inoue's multiculturalist critique of the western Church. The Samurai, on the other hand, makes some cultural accommodations while also reminding the reader of Christ's transcendent critique of all human cultures—east and west inclusively. Somewhere within that ambivalent middle ground between cultural particularity and trans-cultural universality, Endo presents to us the most unlikely representatives of faith—the betrayer, the apostate, the pragmatically insincere convert, the manipulative power broker—who all discover in the Man of Sorrows their hearts' deepest desire.

Notes

1. For readers unfamiliar with Japanese history, William Johnston's “Translator's Preface” to Silence offers a succinct synopsis of the Christian presence in Japan. For a more detailed account of early modern Japan, the reader is referred to volume four of the Cambridge History of Japan.

2. Jurgas Elisonas explains that Xavier was ill served by his interpreter, Yajiro, a man whose Christian zeal exceeded his theological grasp. It was Yajiro who told Xavier that “the Japanese religious preached that ‘there is only one God, creator of all things’” and that this God was known by the name of “de ny chy” (Dainichi). In fact, Dainichi refers to the central Buddha of the Shingon sect of Buddhism and is understood to be “the ultimate reality that is identical with the total functioning of the cosmos and also identical with the enlightened mind” (Elisonas 307-08), a conception of the divine considerably different from the Christian belief in the personal Creator of the universe.

3. In his classic exposition of Bushido, Nitobe calls a “loose business morality … the worst blot on our national reputation,” and devotes considerable attention to the ethical and social chasm separating the merchants from the samurai in feudal Japan (64).

4. One should not infer, however, that the entire samurai ethic can easily be appropriated within Christianity. There are still considerable differences between the Christian valuation of the individual self and the non-individualistic conception of the self implicit in Bushido. Such tensions between Christianity and Bushido, and the possibilities of reconciling them, are lucidly explored by Inaze Nitobe, himself a Japanese Christian.

Works Cited

Endo, Shusaku. A Life of Jesus. Trans. Richard A. Schuchert, S.J. New York: Paulist, 1973.

———. Silence. Trans. William Johnston. New York: Taplinger, 1969.

———. The Samurai. trans. Van C. Gessel. 1980; New York: Kodansha and Harper and Row, 1982.

Gessel, Van C. “Voices in the Wilderness: Japanese Christian Authors.” Monumenta Nipponica 37.4 (1982): 437-57.

Elison, George. Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973.

Elisonas, Jurgis. “Christianity and the Daimyo.” In The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 4: Early Modern Japan. Ed. John Whitney Hall. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. 301-72.

Higgins, Jean. “The Inner Agon of Endo Shusaku.” Cross Currents. 34 (1984-85): 414-26.

Nitobe, Inaze. Bushido: The Soul of Japan. New York: Putnam, 1905.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.