Silence, by Shusaku Endo

In this postmodern day, when words signify nothing and faith is only between you and your God, can anyone understand why a person should refuse to save himself from certain torture and death, just by saying the words, “I apostatize”?

Silence, by Shusaku Endo, is based on the story of a real-life priest who goes to Japan in the midst of one of the worst persecution eras in Christian history. The history of Christianity in Japan is incredibly bitter. Can you believe this? When Francis Xavier landed in Japan in 1549, he actually called it the Asian country “most suited to Christianity,” “the delight of his heart.” Within a generation, there were 300,000 Japanese Christians!

Yet, just as quickly, the priests lost their favour with the Japanese governors. The officials grew tired of foreign intervention in domestic issues, and banned Christianity from the country, executing those who refused to apostatize. While the West has their rousing stories of “the blood the martyrs’ [being] the seed of Christianity”, in Japan, this era of torture practically killed the church. (See Philip Yancey’s review)

The Japanese Christians were hung upside down for days, beheaded, put on stakes in the ocean, thrown into the sea to sink, hung over pits of shit, made to step on the image of Jesus Christ. Today, the bronze trampled image of the Madonna and Child, known as the fumie, is displayed in the museum, and it was while entralled with this exhibit that Endo became inspired to write this book.

Silence — can you guess whose silence? Endo grapples with the silence of God in the midst of this horrific torture, and entertains thoughts that Christianity and Japanese are not suited for one another — Christianity, like a badly made suit — Japan, like a swamp that kills every young sapling, mutating it into a form where it isn’t even Christianity anymore, making all the Japanese Christians who died for their mutated unauthentic faith, a ludicrous absurdity.

Yet, the church survived, somehow. In Nagasaki, pockets of Christians known as the Kakure, or crypto-Christians, hide Christian relics in Buddhist altars and worship the God of the Christians. They use snatches of Latin in their prayers, observe the feast days, and call themselves Christians.

But you know what is ironic? When the atomic bomb fell in Nagasaki, ground zero was the largest Christian church in Japan. While Christians made up less than one percent of the entire population, Christians comprised ten percent of the victims of the bombing.

Ten percent.