[In the following essay, Burkman addresses Endō's artistic handling of the incompatibility of Western religion with Japanese culture.]

The National Christian Council of Japan in 1991 published a thorough review of the state of Christianity in Japan covering the two decades since 1971. It is widely known in Christian circles that baptized believers in Japan number about one percent of the population. The 1970 statistics indeed revealed that Japan's 722,942 Protestants and 371,148 Catholics constituted 1.06 percent of the population. The interesting revelation in the 1991 report is that, while the Japanese citizenry by 1991 had increased by some 21 million, the number of Christian adherents had actually dropped by 2,056, with the result that the Christian portion of the population stood at 0.88 percent.¹

Japan has a long history of borrowing and ingesting culture and ideology from other societies. In the evolution of patterns of thought and rituals of life, the Japanese are deeply indebted to the Indian religion of Buddhism, while the rules for human interaction applied in Japan are taken from Chinese Confucianism. Students of cultural transfer have no simple answer to the question of why Japanese society, which has obviously drunk so deeply of Western technology, material culture, and popular culture, has been so impenetrable to the Christian faith—and this despite a modern century and a half of nearly uninterrupted legal freedom to adhere and proselytize, as well as the presence of more foreign missionaries per capita than in any other non-Christian land. The question becomes all the more baffling when the unimpressive numerical progress of Christian evangelization in modern Japan is compared to the growth of neighboring churches in the East Asian cultural sphere—in Korea, Taiwan, and even of late in the People's Republic of China.

The issue of the Western religion's incompatibility with the Japanese cultural context has been given fresh and vigorous expression in Japan in the last three decades by historical novelist and playwright Endo Shusaku.² Endo deals with the matter not rationally, but artistically as a writer of fiction; yet the historical and philosophical import of what he says is undeniable. As a popular and award-winning literary figure, he has confronted a wide segment of the Japanese public, otherwise disinterested in religious discourse, with the person of Christ and the question of what Christian commitment means in the Japanese setting. At the same time, as an unapologetic—yet self-effacing—Christian, Endo has offered the church at home and abroad a new model of the biblical Jesus and new understanding of salvation which issues from his Japanese-ness. The concepts he has advanced have drawn mixed reactions from fellow Christians. The message to the church conveyed by his literature is not edifying; in the words of one of his translators, his novels “do not give you a warm pious glow.”³ For some Japanese, he makes Christ comprehensible and compelling. For some Christians outside Japan, Endo's writing can be an agent in the emancipation of their faith from the encrustation of Western culture.

I

Endo Shusaku was born in 1923 in Tokyo and spent his early childhood years in Manchuria. After his parents' divorce, he and his mother returned to Japan to live with a devout, Catholic aunt in Kobe. First his mother and then he at age eleven were baptized in the Roman Catholic faith. Several of Endo's short stories and novels depict persons who undergo baptism passively or for ulterior motives, who parrot “I believe” at the altar of the church—yet whose lives are permanently imprinted by the force of the sacrament.⁴ In reflection, Endo has styled his baptism as an arranged marriage, devoid at the time of the enviable, conscious love for Jesus that motivated the conversions of other Japanese writers who share his faith.⁵ Elsewhere Endo compares his entry into the church to the donning of ill-fitting clothing:

I have not … chosen Christianity. … Christianity to me was like a western suit my mother made me wear when I was growing up. … However, from my youth, I began to suffer from the fact that this western suit did not fit. To my body, this Western suit was a western suit and not an eastern dress. Either the sleeves were too long or the pants too short. How often have I thought of throwing away this suit. How often have I tried to wear something which fits my body. That I, nevertheless, was unable to throw it away, was because I had nothing else to put on, and moreover because of my love for my mother and of the strength of Christianity which my mother made me wear.⁶

Endo majored in French literature at Keio University and left Japan in 1950 to pursue graduate work at the University of Lyons—the first Japanese to study abroad in the postwar period. There he studied Mauriac, Bernanos, and other French Catholic writers. Endo's fiction is often compared to that of English novelist Graham Greene. Despite recurring respiratory ailments, Endo in the four decades of his literary career has written on the average one full-length novel a year, as well as several plays and a dozen volumes of short stories. Eight of his full-length works are available in English translation. In Japan he has received the coveted Akutagawa Prize and the Mainichi Cultural Award and served as president of the prestigious P.E.N. Club (a society of writers). The Pope in 1971 conferred on him the Order of St. Sylvester, and three American universities have awarded him honorary doctorates.⁷

Let us look briefly at two of Endo's historical novels, Silence and The Samurai, both set in the seventeenth century when the curtain was being lowered on Japan's “Christian century.”

II

Silence [Japanese: Chinmoku] became a best seller soon after it hit bookstores in 1966. Its central figure is Rodrigues, a Portuguese Jesuit who steals into the southern island of Kyushu in defiance of recent measures by the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1867) to stamp out the Catholic faith and prevent the entry of all Westerners (except a few carefully restricted Dutch) onto Japanese soil. Rodrigues comes to encourage the faithful kakure [hidden] Christians, but is also moved by a private desire to discover what led his former superior, Fr. Ferreira, to apostatize. Rodrigues has reliable information that Ferreira escaped a martyr's death by trampling on the fumie [a bas-relief image of Christ or the Virgin] and is actually assisting the authorities in ferreting out recalcitrant Christians and getting them to renounce their religion. Rodrigues escapes detection for a few months, assisted by kakure for whom he officiates at the mass. At a distance he witnesses the destruction of a whole village and the execution by drowning of unswerving Christian peasants. In the midst of this hardship he is sustained by his love for the face of Christ.

From hideout to hideout the priest is guided, and eventually betrayed, by a wretched, foul-smelling, cringing man named Kichijiro. Kichijiro has apostatized many times, can never purge his sense of guilt, and begs the priest repeatedly for absolution. While this Judas-figure is clearly the most despicable character Endo has created, Kichijiro is the one for whom the novelist has the greatest affection. “Kichijiro is I,” he has confessed in public, for this is how Endo fears he would act under circumstances of ultimate stress.⁸ In Silence Kichijiro voices the classical dilemma of the defeated pilgrim: “God asks me to imitate the strong, even though he made me weak. Isn't that unreasonable?”⁹

When Rodrigues is captured and incarcerated in Nagasaki, Ferreira enters his cell. The aged, former missionary begins the dialogue:

“For twenty years I labored in the mission. … The one thing I know is that our religion does not take root in this country.”

“It is not that it does not take root,” cried Rodrigues in a loud voice, shaking his head. “It's that the roots are torn up.”

“At the loud cry of the priest, Ferreira did not so much as raise his head. Eyes lowered he answered like a puppet without emotion: “The country is a swamp. In time you will come to see that for yourself. 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.”

“There was a time [retorted Rodrigues] when the sapling grew and sent forth leaves. … When you first came to this country churches were built everywhere, faith was fragrant like the fresh flowers of the morning, and many Japanese vied with one another to receive baptism like the Jews who gathered at the Jordan. …”

“What the Japanese of that time believed in was not our God. It was their own gods. For a long time we failed to realize this and firmly believed that they had become Christians.”

Rodrigues agonizes over this encounter. Ferreira appears again in the climactic scene. The groans of native Christians, bleeding and suspended upside down over a pit of excrement, form the background for their conversation. Ferreira recounts his own moment of apostasy:

“When I spent that night here five people were suspended in the pit. Five voices were carried to my ears on the wind. The official said: ‘If you apostatize, those people will immediately be taken out of the pit, their bonds will be loosed, and we will put medicine on their wounds.’ I answered: ‘Why do these people not apostatize?’ And the official laughed as he answered me: ‘They have already apostatized many times. But as long as you don't apostatize these peasants cannot be saved.”’

“And you …” The priest spoke through his tears. “You should have prayed. …”

“I did pray. I kept on praying. But prayer did nothing to alleviate their suffering. …”

Ferreira launches his final assault on the wavering priest:

“You make yourself more important than them. You are preoccupied with your own salvation. It's because you dread to betray the Church. You dread to be the dregs of the Church, like me. … Yet I was the same as you. On that cold, black night I, too, was as you are now. And yet is your way of acting love? A priest ought to live in imitation of Christ. If Christ were here. …”

For a moment Ferreira remained silent; then he suddenly broke out in a strong voice: “Certainly Christ would have apostatized for them.”

As the fumie is placed before the feet of Rodrigues, the captured missionary gazes for the first time since he came to Japan upon the face, that face whose beauty has been the vision that sustained him through danger and near despair. What he sees now is a face worn down and hollow from repeated trampling. It is, in Endo's words, “the ugly face of Christ, crowned with thorns and the thin, outstretched arms.”

He will now trample on what he has considered the most beautiful thing in his life, on what he has believed most pure, on what is filled with the ideals and the dreams of man. How his foot aches! And then the Christ in bronze speaks to the priest: “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.”

The priest placed his foot on the fumie. Dawn broke. And far in the distance the cock crew.¹⁰

Silence, like many of Endo's writings, depicts the unbridgeable gap that lies between Eastern pantheism and Western monotheism. According to the Dutch translator of Silence, Fr. Francis F. Uyttendaele, the difference is one

between a systematized, clearly differentiated and organized view of the universe (the West) and an undifferentiated, unlimited merging of all beings into one whole (the East). … Endo emphasizes Eastern man's lack of the sense of God, sin, and death. For if there is no basic distinction between man and nature, between man and God, then man is but a fragment of the cosmic whole; then death is but a change which absorbs man back into this whole; then evil, rather than being something that places man in opposition to the supreme being, is but a disturbance of the cosmic order. Then, too, the problem of God lacks any serious dimension, any finality.¹¹

Endo has also spoken of the need of the Christian writer to see the saving love of God at work in the hidden center of each person, even those who have fallen into terrible sin.¹² That is not to say that Endo denies the stark reality of human sin. He challenges his native cultural context in his novel The Sea and Poison by depicting atrocities committed against prisoners of war in the Pacific War. Yet his pen is merciful toward the likes of Kichijiro. Even Rodrigues's act of treading on the fumie is treated as a salvation moment in the journey of the priest. In an epilogue scene of Silence, Kichijiro comes once more to the fallen priest Rodrigues to ask divine forgiveness. The apostate cleric recounts the pain in his own foot as he trampled on the face, and hears Christ say that He understands his pain and suffering. “I suffered beside you,” says the Jesus inside Rodrigues. Endo's lead character then shakes the conventional understanding of the Passion narrative even further by noting that Jesus commanded Judas to do what he was going to do. Rodrigues administers the sacrament to Kichijiro. As Kichijiro turns to leave, the fallen priest knows that even in the moment of denial, his Lord had not been silent.¹³

Those attracted to the work of Graham Greene will recognize in the mestizo in The Power and the Glory a prototype of the Judas figure, Kichijiro. The Whisky Priest of the same work bears many similarities to the hunted cleric Rodrigues.¹⁴

The historian instinctively asks how much of Silence is verifiable history. The setting of the novel is factual. That there was a successful planting of Catholicism in Japan in the work of Portuguese Jesuit Francis Xavier and his successors in the latter half of the sixteenth century is widely known. Equally well known is the turning of the Tokugawa Shogunate against the foreign faith and the expulsion of all missionaries. After the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637 (framed as a Christian uprising by the Shogunate), the policy to stamp out this potential political threat became all the more determined, and the means to reclaim its kakure adherents all the more ingenious. There was a real Christovao Ferreira, the Portuguese Provincial, who after being suspended in the pit for six hours gave the signal of apostasy, and whose grave can still be seen in a temple in Nagasaki. His defection and subsequent collaboration with the persecutors sent shock waves through the Jesuit community worldwide in the 1630s. In 1643 there came a group of ten missionaries who tried to enter and undo the damage done by Ferreira. They were quickly captured and all apostatized after long and terrible torture. Among them was Giuseppe Chiara, Endo's model for Rodrigues. Chiara died in Japan some forty years later, stating that he was still a Christian.¹⁵ Endo's detailed narrative of Rodrigues's clandestine work, capture, turmoil of the soul, and apostasy is, of course, a literary creation.

Truly impressive are the soundness of Endo's depiction of the life of impoverished peasants in early Tokugawa Japan, down to details of diet and clothing, and his grasp of the provincial and local officialdom of the Shogunate which effected the proscription policy. One mark of Endo's skill as a world-class writer is his creation in Silence and other novels of wholly credible non-Japanese characters true to their culture and their times. How many Western artists, including Giacomo Puccini and James Clavell, have succeeded in constructing believable Japanese figures?¹⁶ The notion that baptized Japanese illiterates never understood true Christianity and that the faith they embraced was at its core a collage of Buddhism and Shinto thinly overlaid with Christian trappings is not unique to Endo. Jesuit-trained historian George Elison, author of the premier Western study of Japan's Christian century, describes the Jesuit strategy of employing native religious terminology (such as the Buddhist “Dainichi” for God). “It is not difficult to see,” reasons Elison, “why some Japanese listeners could mistake the Christianity preached by Xavier for just another sub-sect of Buddhism.” As for the kakure to whom Rodrigues ministered, Elison states that their faith “gradually deteriorated and merged with the grassroots of native popular religion.” The sixteenth-century Jesuit missionaries themselves were reluctant to admit Japanese to the priesthood and the Order for the very reason that they believed most Japanese to be incapable of true orthodoxy. After three decades of evangelization when the baptized numbered 130 thousand, there were only fifty-five Japanese members of the Society of Jesus—and only twenty-three of them priests.¹⁷

III

When it appeared in 1980, the novel The Samurai won Endo the Noma Prize, one of the most important literary awards in Japan. The story begins in northeastern Japan at the time when the move to ban Christianity was gaining momentum in the councils of the Shogun. Endo builds the novel around a mission of Japanese sent by the lord of a northeastern domain and the Shogunate across the Pacific on the ship San Juan Baptista to Mexico and then across the Atlantic to Seville, Madrid, and finally the Vatican. While this little-known embassy in fact took place in 1613-1615, the paucity of first-hand reports on its purpose and activities gives Endo almost a free hand in creating a work of speculation. In any case, the mission serves Endo simply as a framework on which to weave a chronicle of the inner spiritual struggle of its chief envoy, samurai Hasekura Rokuemon.

The Spanish interpreter for this mission, Velasco (modeled after an actual Fr. Luis Sotelo), embodies everything distasteful about aggressive Christian missionary culture. He will stoop to any connivance or dishonesty to open the door of Japan to evangelization. As a Franciscan, he detests the Jesuits who planted the cross in Japan and blames them for the government's growing disaffection with the foreign faith. The depth of his desire to see the Jesuits supplanted by his own order in Japan is surpassed by only one passion—to be appointed himself by the Pope as Bishop of Japan. Preoccupied with maintaining his own purity, he binds his wrists each night to prevent indulgence in self-gratification. Abusing his task of interpreter, he subverts the mission from its original purpose to secure trade with Nueva Espana and leads it on to Rome as a showy demonstration of the success of the Franciscan enterprise in Japan. Using Spanish language classes aboard ship as a vehicle, he earnestly catechizes the Japanese, who for their part display incredulity and boredom at the stories Velasco relates from the Gospels. Velasco reflects dourly on how the Japanese seek in religion the benefits of this life, and on the inability of Christianity to penetrate what Endo in Silence calls the “mud-swamp of Japan”:

“When I look at the Japanese, I sometimes wonder whether a true religion—one that seeks after eternity and the salvation of the soul as we understand them—can develop in that country. There is too great a gap between their form of godliness and that which we Christians know as faith.”¹⁸

Matsuki, the most perceptive and cynical of the samurai envoys, counters Velasco's summons to true happiness.

“Your brand of happiness is too intense for Japan. A strong medicine turns to poison in the bodies of some. The happiness you padres preach is poison to Japan, … a nuisance for our little islands.”

After observing the depredations by the Spanish conquerors in Mexico, Matsuki tells Velasco, “This country would have lived in peace if the Spanish ships had not come. Your version of happiness has disrupted this country.” Matsuki refuses to accompany the mission to Europe and returns to Acapulco for passage to Asia.¹⁹

Velasco resolves to fight fire with fire, to “channel their carnal ambitions towards God's teachings.” He convinces the thirty-eight merchant members of the group that their embracing of the Christian faith is essential if they expect to sell their wares in Christian Nueva Espana, and orchestrates their baptism in a Franciscan chapel in Mexico City. The three samurai envoys know that their honor depends on returning to Japan with a Pacific trade agreement in hand. Hasekura and his colleagues grudgingly acquiesce in the sacrament, and mouth “I believe” in a crowded cathedral in Seville. Here one cannot miss the autobiographical connection to Endo's own passive baptism as a child. Throughout the journey, Velasco arranges for the Japanese to be awed by the pageantry, wealth, and power of the church, to which even the king of Spain subordinates himself. The mission in the end is thwarted by intelligence, supplied to Rome by the Jesuits, that decrees have been issued in Japan banning the faith and expelling missionaries. The disheartened Samurai retraces his path across the oceans back to Japan, finally to face death at the stake for his superficial conversion. The merchants, being of commoner class, are allowed to fade back into the fabric of Japanese society.

Velasco is a model of the self-assured, assertive person of religion that Endo dislikes most in his literary works and in real life. It is a mark of Endo's charity that, before The Samurai ends, the Franciscan is allowed a mellowing process and death as a true Christian martyr, and is accorded a place in the eternal mansions.

The Samurai differs from Silence in that it lacks a dramatic clash of ideologies. Hasekura is a rather subdued, introspective character when compared to Rodrigues. His faith, which shows itself in his death, is passive, non-rational, and internalized.²⁰ But a significant tie between the two novels is found in the symbol of the face of Christ. On the journey across Mexico and Spain, Velasco arranges for the Japanese mission to lodge in Franciscan monasteries. From every bed the Samurai gazes up at a crucifix. At first, Hasekura's reaction is to question why anyone would worship an emaciated man with both hands nailed to a cross, with head drooping. He is reminded of a prisoner he once saw paraded about, ugly and filthy, with stomach hollow and ribs protruding. He contrasts the image of Jesus on the crucifix with the stately Buddhas in the temples of Japan: “What would the people in the marshland think … if I worshipped someone like this?”²¹ On the eve of his baptism, he glances at the image:

“This ugly, emaciated man. This man devoid of majesty, bereft of outward beauty, so wretchedly miserable. A man who exists only to be discarded after he has been used. A man born in a land I have never seen, and who died in the distant past. He has nothing to do with me. …”²²

It is only after the frustration of his mission at Rome that the Samurai begins to warm to the face in the crucifix:

[T]he samurai closed his eyes and pictured the man who had peered down at him each night from the walls of his rooms in Nueva Espana and Espana. For some reason he did not feel the same contempt for him he had felt before. In fact it seemed as though that wretched man was much like himself. …²³

For Endo, Jesus is not to be found in the sermons of priests or the edifices of Christendom, or even in the character of the saints. In “Shadows,” a very autobiographical short story, a youthful central character finally gathers the courage to voice, by letter, his frustration to his priest-mentor:

“If there are the strong and the weak among human beings, in those days you were truly one of the strong. And I was a spineless weakling. You had confidence in your way of life, in your faith, in your body, and you performed your missionary labors in Japan with firm conviction. In contrast, not once in my life have I been able to feel confidence and conviction about every facet of my life. … But weren't you forced to learn, some fifteen years later, that unexpected perils and danger spots like thin ice lurk within such strength, and that amidst such perils come the beginnings of true religion?”²⁴

Endo finds disciplined, consistently virtuous Christian role models to be intimidating.²⁵ In The Samurai, the lead character discovers the Jesus of the cross in a renegade monk he meets living in poverty in an Indian village in Mexico. This man, who wears a pigtail, had run away from the cloisters of the church to share the burdens of the dispossessed natives of Mexico. That man too is sick and dirty. His words to the samurai describe Endo's Christ:

“I can believe in Him now because the life He lived in this world was more wretched than any other man's. … He understands the hearts of the wretched, because His entire life was wretched. He knows the agonies of those who die a miserable death, because He died in misery. He was not in the least powerful. He was not beautiful.”²⁶

When they part, the pigtailed man gives the samurai a note with these words:

He is always beside us.
He listens to our agony and our grief.
He weeps with us.
And He says to us,
“Blessed are they who weep in this life, for in the kingdom of heaven they shall smile.”(27)

When he returns to Japan, Hasekura is placed under house arrest and awaits a sentence of death. He reads the note again.

The samurai imagined the pigtailed man putting these words to paper in his hut at Tecali. Nights in the swamp at Tecali were probably as dark and deep as those here in the marshland. The samurai felt he had a vague idea now why the pigtailed man had been impelled to write these words. He had wanted an image of “that man” which was all his own. He had wanted not the Christ whom the affluent priests preached in the cathedrals of Nueva Espana, but a man who would be at his side, and beside the Indians, each of them forsaken by others. … The samurai could almost see the face of the man who had scribbled these clumsy letters.²⁸

As the story draws to a close, the samurai reflects on his trip across the seas:

“I crossed two great oceans and went all the way to Espana to meet a king. But I never met a king. All I ever saw was that man.”²⁹

IV

Endo Shusaku is vitally concerned with conveying to his countrymen a representation of Christ which they can comprehend. In one of his writings he pictures the streams of people in Shinjuku and Shibuya, places of human traffic in Tokyo familiar to every Japanese. “Nowhere is there a Christian atmosphere,” he observes. “There is not even a ‘stepping stone” which would lead to a demonstration of the existence of God.”³⁰

As his contribution to providing such a “stepping stone,” Endo in 1973 published Iesu no shogai [trans. A Life of Jesus, 1978]. In his words, Endo wrote this book

for the benefit of Japanese readers who have no Christian tradition of their own and who know almost nothing about Jesus. What is more, I was determined to highlight the particular aspect of love in his personality precisely in order to make Jesus understandable in terms of the religious psychology of my non-Christian countrymen and thus to demonstrate that Jesus is not alien to their religious sensibilities.³¹

Endo writes as a novelist, drawing his material from the four Gospels, and disclaiming the qualifications of a theologian. In this work we find a Christology consistent with the Christ and Christ-figures which appear in his novels.

Moving chronologically through the life of Jesus, Endo begins by contrasting the authoritarian, father-image of God purveyed by John the Baptist with the feminine, mother-love image of God he sees in Jesus. Endo perceives Jesus' mission on earth as the emancipation of the Jews and then all humankind from a God of vengeance and silence, before whom supplicants could assume no other posture than awe. Endo adds drama to the contrast by bringing in Jesus' inquisitors—the Pharisees and doctors of the law—who are offended by Jesus' direct and indirect attacks on the stern, legalistic God they were pledged to protect. The softer Jesus image, Endo believes, can appeal to the Japanese because it parallels their cherished model of the ideal Japanese mother—one who forgives, suffers, and sacrifices for the love of her children.³² It is noteworthy that Endo voiced this idea a decade prior to the appearance of feminist theology as a movement.

As Jesus conducts His Galilean ministry, Endo pictures a steady decline in the effectiveness of His ministry. As their expectation to be politically freed by a savior goes unmet, the crowds diminish. The demand that He perform miracles, the tired man with the sunken eyes will not and cannot meet. Contrary to the expectations of the people, He conveys over and over again in word and deed the message of the Beatitudes—“Blessed are the poor in spirit. … Blessed are those who mourn.” He wipes the sweat from the brow of a fever-racked patient whom others have abandoned, and holds the hand of a mother who had lost her child—just like He never abandoned Rodrigues and the samurai. Jesus realizes that what people need more than miraculous cures is love. But in the visible world, Jesus is a helpless failure, a feckless has-been. Meanwhile, His enemies in religion and politics become more resourceful in their scheming and more ruthless in their attacks. By the week of His trial, His band of “followers” shrinks to a bickering handful, themselves unable after three years of intimacy to comprehend the powerless Jesus. “As things turned out,” writes Endo, “Jesus showed no sign of any power whatsoever. All he did was to die in a way more dreadful and more wretched than most other sinners.”³³

Endo has studied the works of Japanese Christian theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, and acknowledges their influence upon his thought. There are clear similarities between Endo's model of the emaciated Jesus and the Theology of the Pain of God which bear further exploration. This school of thought was expounded in the postwar years by Protestant theologian Kitamori Kazo. Kitamori acknowledges indebtedness to his Buddhist cultural milieu and the Buddhist theme that all existence is suffering. Kitamori teaches that pain is the essence of God, that human pain is used by God as a symbol of His own pain, and that love is based on pain. This concept is not easily understood in the West where the God of joy is centerpiece and where suffering is considered an aberration from the Divine order. Like Endo, Kitamori tried to craft, on the basis of Scripture, a view of God readily comprehensible in Japan which historically views itself as a land of suffering.³⁴

Conventional Christians readily agree with Endo that in worldly terms Jesus was a failure. But where they and Endo part ways is the standard Christian view that Jesus somehow deliberately restrained himself from exercising the full power that was His at any time as God; or that the rejected Jesus, divinely capable of seeing His future glory, was all the while triumphant at heart. Endo would argue, I believe, that God Incarnate was as powerless as any other man would be, and that He was self-consciously so. It was, in fact, only by experiencing and feeling genuine powerlessness that Jesus was, and is, able to credibly pity and stand beside mortals in their moments of impotence. Yet God somehow—and this is the real “miracle” of Jesus—enabled Jesus, in the midst of failure, to maintain trust in the God of love and to consistently exercise that love toward fellow human beings. In the resurrection—which Endo affirms—the powerless Jesus was reborn into the all-powerful Jesus, and His followers likewise were transformed into confident witnesses to the God of love.³⁵ In several of his writings, Endo features fictional Christ figures—innocent persons, apparently ineffectual, who suffer at the hands of those they love, and in the end exert an unexplained spiritual influence.³⁶

Endo rejects the historicity of the miraculous acts of Jesus, believing that those chronicled in the Gospels were added to the accounts by adoring followers after His death. On this point Endo has been the recipient of criticism from fellow Christians of orthodox conviction. Sako Junichiro, a literary critic-turned-pastor in the United Church of Christ in Japan (Kyodan), has questioned the empirical basis for Endo's denial of the miracle stories. He would have Endo view miracles of healing as acts of love. Sako also accuses Endo of selective emphasis on those parts of the Gospel narratives which imply Jesus' weakness. He asserts that the crowds rejected Jesus because of his strength rather than His weakness, and that in Jesus' most glaring moment of weakness (the cross) His actual power was displayed in His forgiveness of His murderers.³⁷ Catholic critics in Japan have also attacked Endo on the subject of miracles, and have accused him of denigrating the memory of the seventeenth-century martyrs and vindicating acts of apostasy and betrayal.

Is there a valid Christianity which is compatible with the Japanese social setting? Being neither dogmatic preacher nor systematic theologian, Endo Shusaku gives answers to this question which are oblique. But taking his historical novels and his writings on Jesus together, one can infer a negative. East and West do not meet on the plain of religion. In this regard Endo parts company with a noble tradition of modern Japanese thinkers such as Nitobe Inazo who asserted the existence of fundamental common convictions which make possible a bridging of the philosophical and religious gap between the Occident and the Orient.³⁸ In this Endo speaks unintentionally in an anti-colonial, anti-modern mode, in which a Christianity which is valid for Japanese need not harmonize with the classical dogmas and practices established in the West and transported to Japan by missionaries. Also by anti-modern critique, Endo can be faulted for making Japanese cultural habits and world views appear unique, intrinsically hostile to Christianity, and forever unchanging.

Nonetheless, Endo remains in search, for himself and his compatriots, of the “Eastern dress” that the Japanese believer in Jesus may comfortably wear. In this search he does not dissociate himself from his Buddhist surroundings, much as St. Paul wrote Christian theology self-consciously as a Jew, and St. John expressed the Gospel in the Greek conceptual vocabulary in which he was at home. Hence Endo's God is one of maternal love, in the tradition of a Japanese Buddhism which transformed the Bodhisattva Kannon from its Chinese androgynous expression into the image of a female goddess of mercy. Endo makes it clear that the sought-after dress will be alien to both the pantheist East and the triumphalist West. Its Savior will be the Jesus weak and broken, the person who identifies with our inadequacies because He on earth also failed, who takes pity on us, and who plants in us in our moment of pain a seed of salvation which can grow to eternal life.

Notes

1. Kumazawa Yoshinobu and David L. Swain, eds., Christianity in Japan, 1971-1990 (Tokyo: Kyo Bun Kwan, 1991), xiv. Because of questionings about the orthodoxy of certain groups, the 1991 count did not include Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses, which were included in the 1971 totals. However, if current membership figures for these groups are added to the 1991 totals, the number of Christians relative to the Japanese population still drops below the one percent figure.

2. This paper follows the Japanese convention of placing family name before given name.

3. Michael Gallagher, “For These the Least of My Brethren: The Concern of Shusaku Endo,” unpublished paper presented at John Carroll University, 18 May 1991, 5.

4. E.g. Endo, “Shadows,” Japanese original 1968, draft trans. by Van C. Gessel, 1992, 3.

5. Sako Junichiro, “The Life of Jesus in Literature: A Criticism of Endo Shusaku's Understanding of Jesus,” in Rengo (July 1980), 4.

6. Endo, “Watashi no bungaku” [My literature], in Ishi no koe, translated in Interboard Bulletin (February 1972), 1.

7. Francis Mathy, “Shusaku Endo: Japanese Catholic Novelist,” in America 167:3 (August 1-8, 1992), 66-67.

8. Endo, speaking at “Silences and Voices: The Writings of Shusaku Endo,” a symposium at John Carroll University, 18 May 1991. The application of the Judas motif to the artist is also seen in the well-known Christian print artist Watanabe Sadao (1913-). In Watanabe's “The Last Supper” (1966), Jesus and eleven disciples face the viewer, while Judas sits in the foreground with his back toward the viewer. Judas hence is positioned in same direction as the artist and the spectators. Watanabe intends for the viewer to recognize that in the Passion, “we are Judas.” Hans-Ruedi Weber, “Watanabe's Dream: Art for the People,” in One World (August-September 1986), 5.

9. Endo, Silence, 186.

10. Endo, Silence, trans. William Johnston (Rutland VT: C. E. Tuttle Co., 1969), 236-239, 267-271.

11. Francis F. Uyttendaele, “Shusaku Endo,” in Japan Christian Quarterly 38:4 (Fall 1972): 203.

12. Mathy, “Shusaku Endo,” 67.

13. Endo, Silence, 296-298.

14. Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (New York: The Viking Press, 1946); Michael Gallagher, “A Japanese-Catholic Novel,” in Commonweal 85:5 (4 November 1966), 137.

15. William Johnston, “Translator's Preface,” in Endo, Silence, 2-10. The careers of Ferreira and of inquisitor Inoue, another important figure in Rodrigues's apostasy, are detailed in George Elison, Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), ch. 7.

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19. Endo, The Samurai, 112-113.

20. Gessel, “Voices in the Wilderness,” 445, 448.

21. Endo, The Samurai, 159.

22. Endo, The Samurai, 167.

23. Endo, The Samurai, 242.

24. Endo, “Shadows,” 8.

25. It is noteworthy that Christian thinkers in the West are beginning to warn against glib and arrogant claims to spiritual health. E.g., J. I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness (Ann Arbor: Servant, 1992).

26. Endo, The Samurai, 220.

27. Endo, The Samurai, 242.

28. Endo, The Samurai, 243.

29. Endo, The Samurai, 258.

30. Endo, “Watashi no Bungaku,” 3.

31. Endo, “Preface to the American Edition,” in A Life of Jesus, trans. Richard A. Schuchert (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 1.

32. Endo, A Life of Jesus, 1, 2, 24.

33. Endo, A Life of Jesus, 80, 152-154.

34. Kitamori Kazo, Theology of the Pain of God (Richmond VA: John Knox Press, 1965); and Carl Michalson, Japanese Contributions to Christian Theology (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), ch. 3.

35. Endo, A Life of Jesus, 159, 177-178.

36. Richard A. Schuchert, “Translator's Preface,” in Endo, A Life of Jesus, 4.

37. Sako, “The Life of Jesus in Literature,” 5.

38. E.g., Nitobe Inazo, Japanese Traits and Foreign Influences (London: Kegan […]