The discovery of King Richard III’s bones underneath a car park in Leicester was one of the hottest news stories of 2012. And it still generates a lot of interest: according to the BBC, since the reburial in 2015 of Richard’s remains beneath a handsome tomb in Leicester Cathedral, about 2,500 visitors a day have come to a church that hitherto rarely attracted throngs of tourists.
Now, like the cathedral in Leicester, the Catholic cathedral in Tokyo may start drawing crowds, in part because of a new shrine to a Catholic martyr whose bones were recently entombed there, and in part because of the forthcoming film Silence, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Andrew Garfield and Liam Neeson.
Silence is a movie Scorsese has been thinking about for 25 years. It’s based on the novel of the same name by Shusaku Endo, a Japanese Catholic novelist who was the runner-up for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. (Endo was edged out by fellow Japanese writer Kenzaburo Ōe.)
Sadly, Endo will not walk the red carpet when Silence opens on December 23 – he died in 1996. Yet during all these years of delay, Scorsese never lost his enthusiasm for the novel that is the basis of his film. He has said that Silence is Endo’s “greatest novel, and one that has become increasingly precious to me as the years have gone by”. It’s a book that he admits he has re-read countless times.
Flash back to July 2014, when builders, working in the car park of an apartment complex in Tokyo, unearthed three skeletons. The site was known to be the location of a 17th-century prison known as the Kirishitan Yashiki, or Christian Mansion. Given what Christians endured there, the term “mansion” must have been used ironically.
One of the skeletons had been placed in a coffin, fragments of which survive. The other two skeletons had been less carefully buried. Analysis of the remains found that the body in the coffin was that of a European, specifically a middle-aged Italian male. The other two skeletons were of an elderly Japanese male and an elderly Japanese female. The remains were dated to the 18th century.
Based on the evidence at the site and the historical record, the bones have since been identified as those of an Italian Jesuit priest, Fr Giovanni Battista Sidotti, and a Japanese couple employed by the prison named Chosuke and Haru.
Early in the 18th century, Fr Sidotti had managed to persuade his Jesuit superiors, and even Pope Clement XI, to permit him to travel to Japan in the hope of finding and ministering to Japanese Catholics who were trying to practise their faith in secret – a heroic effort in the face of a nationwide persecution of Christians which had been going on for more than a century. Fr Sidotti was determined bring the Mass and the sacraments to Japanese Catholics who were being deprived of these graces. And he hoped, God willing, that he might even make a few converts. To be blunt, such an undertaking was a suicide mission. How Fr Sidotti talked the Jesuits and the pope into letting him go is a mystery.
The first Christian missionary in Japan was St Francis Xavier, a Basque Jesuit, who landed ashore in 1552. As an intellectual, Xavier was enchanted by the beauty and sophistication of Japanese culture. As for the Japanese, the upper classes were attracted to this religion built on the dual concepts of faith and reason, while the lower classes of Japanese society were inspired by the compassion and charity of the missionary priests. Thirty-five years after Xavier’s arrival there were more than 100 Jesuit missionaries serving 200,000 Japanese Catholic converts, a network of churches, and a seminary where young Japanese men studied for the priesthood.
The shogunate, which dominated the government in Japan, was ambivalent about the foreigners. On the one hand, the Christians were a counterbalance to the sometimes aggressive Shinto and Buddhist clergy. Furthermore, representatives of the kings of Spain and Portugal had made it clear that as long as the priests and the Japanese Christians were not molested by the government, trade would continue unimpeded, including the sale of an item the Japanese did not have and were desperate to possess: European firearms.
On the other hand, there were fears in Japan that the missionaries and the merchants were an advance guard of an invasion force that would reduce Japan to a colony. In such a conflict, could the Japanese Catholics be trusted to side with their nation against the Europeans?
The year 1597 saw the first flare-up of persecution, when 26 Christians – 20 Japanese, four Spaniards, a Mexican and an Indian – were crucified in Nagasaki. From that day on, persecution of the Church was erratic. Then throughout the first half of the 17th century the government became ever more determined to close the country to foreign influences. Merchants from abroad were restricted to three islands; no European was permitted on the Japanese mainland; and Christianity was outlawed.
During the years of persecution, it is estimated that between 200,000 and 300,000 Japanese Christians – including women and children – lost their lives. As for the missionaries, some fled the country, others suffered gruesome martyrdoms and a few apostatised.
The most infamous priest who gave up his faith is the inspiration for both Endo’s novel and Scorsese’s movie. He was Cristóvão Ferreira, a Portuguese priest who served as superior of the Jesuits in Japan. During his long service in the country – about 30 years – he was revered as a priest of unshakable faith, great intellectual gifts and boundless compassion.
While he was Jesuit superior in Japan, the persecution of Christians became ever more intense. In 1633, Fr Ferreira was arrested, and since he would not renounce Catholicism, he was condemned to execution in the pit. He was suspended upside down in a deep hole filled with rotting nastiness. The stench was suffocating and the pounding of blood in his skull from being left upside down was excruciating.
After several hours in the pit, Fr Ferreira could not bear it any longer. He renounced the Catholic faith and “confessed” that missionaries were an advance guard for a European conquest of Japan. To prove that his renunciation of Catholicism was sincere, he became a Buddhist, married and served as an interrogator of Christian captives.
Ferreira’s fall was a devastating blow to Japanese Christians, and a source of confusion and shame to his brother Jesuits around the world. What was Ferreira’s state of mind after his renunciation? How could he reconcile his past life with his new life as an agent of a hostile government and a collaborator in the persecution of Christians?
To explore these questions, Scorsese, following Endo’s novel, pits Ferreira (Liam Neeson) against a young Portuguese Jesuit captive (Andrew Garfield) who wonders what led Ferreira to apostasy. Will he apostasise himself – and if he does, does it matter?
Meanwhile there was no chance that Fr Sidotti (whose story does not specifically feature in the film) would not be captured, and when the authorities presented him his options, he chose martyrdom. The Italian had slipped into the country in 1708, disguised as a samurai. Once he was captured, he was interrogated by Arai Hakuseki, a samurai, Confucian scholar and a senior adviser to the shogun.
Hakuseki was fascinated by Sidotti’s range of knowledge, from geography and astronomy to global affairs. He kept notes of his conversations with his prisoner, and later published a book of what he had learned about the West from him.
But Hakuseki couldn’t persuade the priest to save his life by giving up his faith. In the end, the Jesuit was imprisoned in the Kirishitan Yashiki, where he was locked in a cell and left to die. While there, he converted Chosuke and Haru – the only known converts he made during the course of his mission. When the authorities learned that the couple had become Christians, they were starved to death, too. The three died in 1714. It’s likely they were the last of Japan’s Christian martyrs.
Historians estimate that at its height in the early 17th century, about 400,000 Japanese were Catholic. Today the number hovers around 460,000 – barely 0.4 per cent of the population of Japan.
This is a Martin Scorsese film, so it is a safe bet that Silence will draw crowds. But it may also bring a multitude of pilgrims, as well as the curious, to Fr Sidotti’s tomb in Tokyo cathedral. And it might even lead the bishops of Japan to open the Cause that could lead to the Italian priest’s canonisation.
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