Here he encountered racial abuse and post-war anti-Japanese feeling, but also an imperial legacy rapidly disintegrating, with uprisings in Madagascar and Algeria. As a Japanese Catholic he travelled to France in 1950 to study literature at the University of Lyon. The change of emphasis is starkest at the film’s conclusion, where Shinoda departs entirely from the novel, seeing in Rodrigues’s idealism little more than a masquerade for imperialism.įor his part, Endo would certainly have understood Shinoda’s impulse. Endo’s novel is told initially in first-person epistolary form, but Shinoda draws back from such intimacy, limiting the voiceover and thus our access to Rodrigues’s thoughts. For Shinoda the gun had a much deeper impact than Christianity, and he consequently shifts some of the focus of Endo’s book away from Rodrigues’s crisis of faith onto a broader historical and philosophical footing. His Silence (Chinmoku) is explicit on this point from the start, the prologue describing the arrival of the Jesuit missionaries in 1549, ‘along with the gun’. The Japanese director Masahiro Shinoda adapted the book in 1971, with a script co-written by Endo. Christianity, after all, arrived with commerce, and Japan’s regional lords initially embraced the new religion because it meant access to luxury goods like silk, and innovative new European technologies, chiefly those associated with warfare. To put it in crudely anachronistic terms, it’s about pushing the brand, and to deny or renounce Jesus is bad PR for the Church. Rodrigues’s quote is one you might readily expect from a Jesuit missionary – an exhortation to spread the word of Jesus. Although it is through Kichijiro that Rodrigues and fellow Jesuit, Francisco Garrpe, arrive in Japan, their intention is to find Christováo Ferreira, their former mentor at the monastery, also rumoured to have apostatised. A specific object, called a fumie, is used for this purpose. They are spared, however, if they are willing to publically apostatise, the act of which involves stepping on a sacred image of Jesus or the Virgin Mary.

In 1643, when the novel is set, Japanese Christianity has been ruthlessly suppressed, its followers maintaining their faith in secret, risking torture and execution if they are discovered. Early in Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel, Silence, the Jesuit missionary Sebastian Rodrigues, quotes Jesus in the Gospels: ‘He who confesses my name before men, him also will I confess before my Father who is in heaven but he who denies my name before men, him also I will deny before my Father who is in heaven.’ Rodrigues’ quote is directed at Kichijiro, a Japanese Christian, and it is also an admonition, Kichijiro having previously apostatised, which is to say renounced his faith.

Silence shusaku endo quotes