The Grace to Go on Living: The Dialectics of Everyday Life and Christian Japanization in Endō Shūsaku’s Silence

Abstract

This study reinterprets Father Rodrigues’s apostasy in Endō Shūsaku’s Silence not as a religious failure, but as a process of Christianity’s “Japanization,” analyzed within the context of postwar Japanese intellectual history. Where existing criticism often falls into the binary opposition between martyrdom and betrayal, this study introduces the perspective of individual conviction versus organizational authority. First, Rodrigues’s act resonates with Yoshimoto Takaaki’s tenkō (ideological conversion) theory, specifically defined as the “third form of tenkō.” This form represents the choice to pursue the integrity of personal conviction over obedience to an organization. This links Rodrigues’s action to the spiritual continuity of the Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians), arguing that the essence of his apostasy is a betrayal of the Church institution, not of faith itself. Furthermore, through the theme of the dialectic of everyday life, the study demonstrates that salvation is discovered not in the glorious death of martyrdom, but within the secular fabric of daily existence. Rodrigues’s paradoxical condition of being both weak and strong as Okada San’emon after the fumie is an extension of the Kakure Kirishitan’s survival, who maintained their faith amid secular labor. In conclusion, Endō’s literature serves as a testimony for the “cowards” and a plea for the grace to go on living. It illuminates the process through which individual faith transcends institutional authority and takes root in the indigenous Japanese way of life, thereby completing the vision of Christianity’s “Japanization.”

1. Introduction

Endō Shūsaku (1923–1996) stands as one of the most representative figures of postwar Japanese literature, particularly within Japanese Christian literature. Frequently mentioned as a potential Japanese candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature following Kawabata Yasunari (川端康成), Endō’s works have been translated into numerous languages including English, German, French, and Russian, and remain widely read today. His best-known novel, Silence (1966), was translated into English by William Johnston in 1969 and continues to be regarded as one of the most significant achievements of modern Japanese fiction in the Western world. The enduring appeal and power of Silence lie in its profound exploration of faith and moral conflict: the suffering of persecuted Japanese believers, the inner torment of Western priests forced to witness their pain, and the climactic act of apostasy, the trampling of Christ’s face on the fumie. These elements form a narrative that resists simple interpretation. Set against the backdrop of harsh anti-Christian persecutions in 17th-century Japan, the novel follows the harrowing journey of Father Rodrigues, a Jesuit missionary seeking to sustain the faithful, and Kichijirō, a weak believer who repeatedly betrays him to the authorities. Confronted with the choice between adhering to church doctrine or apostatizing to save others from torture, these characters are thrust into agonizing moral dilemmas. Witnessing this profound spiritual struggle, readers are often compelled to ask: “What would I have done if I were Rodrigues? If I were Kichijirō?”

Among the numerous critical discussions on Endō Shūsaku’s Silence, one of the most pivotal debates centers on the interpretation of the phrase “Trample! Trample!” during Rodrigues’s act of apostasy in Chapter 8. In the years immediately following the novel’s publication, prevailing readings of this scene were largely negative. Critics argued that the distinctiveness of Silence lay in its portrayal not of a silent God, but of a God who breaks silence, an innovation that was regarded as a theological weakness. Since the Logos descended into the world in human form precisely to allow humankind to hear the silence of God, depicting a God who speaks was seen as undermining the mystery of divine silence (Kasuya 2002, pp. 48–49). Others contended that the novel could have achieved both theological integrity and artistic sublimity as a work of Christian religious fiction if God had broken silence not during itself, but afterward, by embracing the pain of Rodrigues’s apostasy and transforming it into an act of divine compassion (Sako 2002, pp. 53–54).

However, such critiques overlook the fact that Silence is neither a confessional text nor a diary, but rather a fictional narrative shaped by Endō’s creative imagination. One study points out that the voice Rodrigues hears—“Trample! Trample!”—cannot be definitively interpreted as an explicit command from Christ. Chapter 8 of Silence closes with the following passage: “The priest placed his foot on the fumie. Dawn broke. And far in the distance the cock crew” (Endō 2015, p. 231).1 This scene unmistakably recalls the moment in the Gospel of John when Peter, upon hearing the rooster crow, “went out and wept bitterly” in repentance—and was later reconciled with Christ. Yet Rodrigues, unlike Peter, neither repents nor weeps. He thus emerges as the archetype of an apostate priest who no longer believes in a universal God. Through this figuration, Endō renders the wage of sin with greater realism while deliberately leaving the question of salvation unresolved (Doak 2015, p. 11). Accordingly, the apparent absence of sanctity at the climax of this Christian fictional narrative—at the very moment of “Trample! Trample!”—should not be regarded as a flaw. Rather, it serves as a crucial point of reflection, compelling readers to interrogate the very meaning of the sacred itself.

Critical approaches that judge Rodrigues’s apostasy from a strictly theological perspective, asking whether his act is sacred or profane, or whether God remains silent or speaks, fail to recognize that Silence is, at its core, a fictional narrative. The transcendent sanctity sought by such critics is, by its very nature, beyond linguistic articulation; once rendered into language, it already belongs to the secular realm. A religious fiction, therefore, can never embody holiness in itself as an objectified entity. Broadly speaking, the sacred that first emerges as an authorial impulse becomes secularized through the process of literary articulation; only when that secular language evokes within the reader an ineffable sense of divine resonance or affect can the text be said to participate in the sacred. In this sense, Silence is, without qualification, a sacred fiction, its sanctity residing not in its theological correctness, but in the profound affective experience it generates through the very act of reading.

In this regard, Yamane’s recent study, which emphasizes the significance of Chapters 9 and 10, depicting Rodrigues’s inner life and his quiet existence after apostasy, offers an important corrective to earlier readings. Yamane argues that Rodrigues’s experience of Christ’s true love does not occur at the climactic moment when he hears the voice saying “Trample! Trample!” and steps upon the fumie, but rather within the secular life that follows, as he continues to live while reflecting upon that act (Yamane 2023, pp. 223–59). This insight is pivotal because, whether in fiction or nonfiction, the religious meaning of a narrative ultimately depends on its relation to the nonreligious dimensions of everyday life. As will be discussed in later sections, the latent theme of Silence, embodied in the figure of the Kakure Kirishitan (隠れキリシタン, Hidden Christians), illustrates precisely this point. Their faith endured not because their lives were entirely religious, but because their spiritual practices coexisted with secular labor and ordinary livelihood. In the same way, a religious fictional narrative derives its power not from being purely sacred in content, but from the dynamic interplay between the sacred and the secular within it.

Absolute sanctity can never be inherent in a religious fictional narrative. The production and reception of a literary text—mediated through the author’s secular language and apprehended through the reader’s equally secular mode of understanding—are, by nature, entirely worldly processes. Earlier scholarship, such as that by Tsuruta, remains significant for criticizing post-publication readings of Silence that focused on the orthodoxy of Endō’s theology rather than on the textual and literary dimensions (Tsuruta 2002, pp. 179–85). Yet despite its thoroughly secular mediation, Silence continues to exert a powerful spiritual resonance upon readers. What accounts for this enduring sense of the sacred that emerges from within such a secular form?

Endō belonged to the “wartime generation” that experienced a profound ideological rupture. He witnessed a nation that had fanatically devoted itself to militarism and the emperor suddenly embrace Western democracy immediately after the defeat in 1945. This collective experience of forced conversion, where yesterday’s absolute truth became today’s error, left a deep scar on the Japanese psyche. For Endō, the ease with which Japan accepted these foreign ideologies raised a troubling question about the authenticity of faith and conviction.

To examine the enduring power of Silence, this study aims to situate the text within its historical, cultural, and social contexts rather than within a purely sacred framework. The necessity of this approach will become evident as the discussion unfolds. The analysis centers on the concept of tenkō (転向, conversion), defined in postwar Japanese intellectual history as the renunciation of conviction under external pressure. It explores how Endō, as a Christian writer, discovered a distinct mode of religiosity and gave it literary form in Silence and other works, and how this vision intersects with the concerns of postwar Japanese literature.

2. Motherhood as Secularized Sanctity

The first critic to identify the motif of motherhood in Endō Shūsaku’s Christian vision was Etō Jun (1932–1999). His incisive observation initiated a critical lineage that continues to link Endō’s theology of Christianity with maternal imagery. Regarding the famous “Trample! Trample!” scene, Etō writes

However, what is engraved on this copper plate of the fumie is actually “the saddest gaze” of “what he had always considered the most beautiful in his life, what he had believed to be the most sacred, what he had seen as the very ideal and dream of humanity.” As mentioned before, this can be none other than “Mother.” The reason this “Mother’s” “gaze” is “sad” is not because he is about to trample it, but because she knows he has betrayed her twice over. This betrayed “Mother” gazes at him and says, “Go ahead and trample it.” In other words, “Mother” is demanding to be humiliated, destroyed, and defiled a third time.

(Etō 2021, p. 156)

The “Mother” is not only the Virgin Mary of Catholic devotion but also the symbolic “Japanese Mother” who represents the cultural matrix of absorption, indulgence, and assimilation. In Endō’s view, this cultural archetype profoundly influences the reception of Christian theology in Japan; the divine presence, particularly the comforting aspect of the Holy Spirit, tends to be intuitively grasped not as a paternal judge but as a maternal source of unconditional forgiveness (Endō 2016, pp. 130–42). For Endō, the intrusion of a transcendent God who establishes strict distinctions and judges sin constitutes a fundamental violation of this maternal order, which dissolves all contradictions into a harmonious whole. On one level, Rodrigues’s missionary endeavor itself betrays this maternal order by attempting to impose this alien paternal law upon a culture grounded in unconditional acceptance. On another level, when the Mother’s voice urges him to “trample” and he obeys, Rodrigues instrumentalizes her mercy for his own justification, thereby betraying the maternal gaze once again.

Etō explains the fate of the apostate as follows:

Yet one who has once betrayed in order to survive cannot be restored without betraying again. For unless he steps outside the enclosure of the “church” in which he was raised and whose vocabulary he employed—that is, unless he relativizes that supposedly “universal” worldview—he cannot encounter the “Mother.” In other words, the reliable worldview forsaken through “betrayal” cannot be recovered except by means of another betrayal.

(Etō 2021, p. 151)

The maternal love that Endō sought to portray in his fiction is inherently paradoxical—it is a love that must be pursued through the very act of betraying it. Endō thus depicts maternal love as a paradoxical force that can only be realized through betrayal, thereby revealing both the fragility of human faith and the profound demand for salvation that emerges from within failure itself. Equally significant is Etō’s choice to frame this paradox not in terms of “Christianity” but of the “Church.” This distinction is crucial, for in his seminal work on maturity and loss—a cornerstone of postwar Japanese literary criticism—Etō discusses Endō in relation to the broader problem of (ideological conversion). This issue, as will be examined in the following chapter, forms a vital link between Endō’s theology of compassion and the intellectual history of postwar Japan.

In response to Etō Jun’s incisive observation, Endō himself expressed agreement, stating, “There is something within me that projects a maternal quality onto Jesus. […] In some way, I came to entrust the image of my mother to him” (Endō and Yukio 1991, p. 252). The maternal dimension of Christianity in Silence has also been interpreted as emblematic of Japan’s religious culture. Referring to the fumie scene, the religious historian Matsumoto Shigeru argues that religions can be broadly divided into two types: those that are maternal, characterized by mercy and inclusiveness, and those that are paternal, marked by strictness and punishment. Japan, he contends, has traditionally been more closely aligned with the former, and Endō’s Silence exemplifies this maternal religiosity (Matsumoto 1987, pp. 26–29). To reinforce his argument, Matsumoto cites and fully endorses Etō’s interpretation (Matsumoto 1987, p. 30). Through the convergence of authorial intent, textual analysis, and extratextual religious interpretation, the sacred represented in Silence is thus consistently understood as maternal in nature.

About three years after publishing Silence, Endō wrote the short story Hahanaru Mono (Mother),2 in which he depicted the fusion of two kinds of sacredness: the external sanctity represented by the Virgin Mary and the internal sanctity embodied in the Japanese Mother. This synthesis is vividly expressed in his description of Maria Kannon (マリア観音), the object of devotion among the Kakure Kirishitan who have survived to the present day in Nagasaki Prefecture. Endō overlays the lives of these Hidden Christians—who under the Edo shogunate’s prohibition of Christianity had to feign belief in Buddhism, the state-sanctioned “true religion,” while concealing their faith—with those of their ancestors who, in order to preserve Christianity in Japan, were forced to submit at the fumie. Confronted with persecution and the threat of death, these Kakure Kirishitan and their forebears chose betrayal over martyrdom. Endō interprets their “weakness” as a yearning to be forgiven through the intercession of the Virgin Mary, which is why Maria Kannon came to hold such deep significance for them (Endō 2013, p. 37). The image of Maria Kannon thus embodies the fervent prayer of those who, having chosen survival over martyrdom, sought forgiveness and salvation for their fragile faith while continuing, in whatever form possible, to sustain their belief.3

For Endō, tradition was not an immutable inheritance but something that took root only after being adapted and localized in response to changing circumstances. He called this process “Japanization” (日本化) (Endō 2016, p. 140). As a prime example of this adaptation, Endō pointed to Jōdo Shinshū (浄土真宗), discerning in it a religious tradition that gently forgives sinners and embraces them with compassion, offering an accessible path toward salvation. In this sense, he saw in Jōdo Shinshū the maternal quality that characterizes Japanese religiosity. Because of this maternal nature, Endō believed, Jōdo Shinshū became widely accepted as “the religion of the Japanese common people” (Endō 2016, p. 140). It is important to remember, however, that Buddhism did not originate in Japan. Having arisen in India and transmitted to China, Buddhism underwent transformation along the way, and in this process the figure of Guanyin (観音) came to embody maternal qualities. In China, Guanyin became a beloved symbol of gentle mercy and forgiveness, representing the tenderness of divine compassion (Galbraith 2015, p. 131).

This transformation offers a crucial parallel to Endō’s interpretation of the fumie. Although the bronze image physically depicts the male Christ, Endō suggests that for the Japanese believer, this figure is emotionally transmuted into a maternal presence which, like Guanyin, offers forgiveness rather than judgment. As in the case of China, Buddhism in Japan, as a foreign religion, acquired a maternal dimension through the process of secularization. Strictly speaking, therefore, Jōdo Shinshū may not be an indigenous Japanese religion, and maternal religiosity may not be an inherent element of Japan’s religious tradition. Endō believed that for a religious sensibility to take root in the Japanese psyche, it had to be accompanied by a maternal image (Tamaki 2002, p. 128). This, however, can also be understood differently: the maternal image is not merely something discovered as a result, but also something that appears because the Japanese seek to recognize such an image in a “Japanized” foreign religion. What is ultimately significant is not whether a religion objectively possesses a maternal image, but that people desire to find and affirm it within the framework of their own faith.

To facilitate the following discussion, the renowned fumie, “Trample! Trample!,” scene, involving Rodrigues, will be cited here. The English translation is utilized for this quotation (Endō 2015).

The priest raises his foot. In it he feels a dull, heavy pain. This is no mere formality. 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. (Endō 2015, p. 231)

The English translation of Silence is cited here to compare the decisive line “Trample! Trample!” with its Japanese original. The phrase “踏むがいい (Fumu ga ii)” (Endō 2003, p. 268) carries a nuance closer to an insinuating permission, “You may step on it” or “It’s all right to step on it,” rather than a direct command. Rendering it as an imperative, as in the English version, does not fully reflect the gentle and persuasive tone of the original (Doak 2015, p. 10). Because of this difference, the maternal tenderness associated with the line “I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot” loses much of its compassionate resonance. Attention should also be paid to the second-person pronoun “you,” which in the original Japanese is “お前 (omae).” Japanese, unlike English, has a rich system of second-person pronouns, each carrying different relational implications. “Omae” is typically used among men when speaking to an equal or a subordinate, yet it can also appear in family speech, particularly when a mother addresses her son with affection. It is rarely used by women toward daughters, as “omae” is linguistically masculine. A linguistic study found that women’s use of “omae” never occurred in reference to daughters but was exclusively directed toward sons (Katō 2019, pp. 134–35). Thus, unlike the neutral “you” in English, the Japanese “omae” carries a subtle implication of intimacy, even suggesting a maternal voice. While some critics interpret the line as a voice of temptation rather than of merciful forgiveness (Doak 2015, p. 10), the words spoken to Rodrigues, expressing understanding of his pain, ultimately reveal a maternal compassion that embraces human weakness instead of condemning it.

Yet, despite such divergent readings, the voice that tells Rodrigues to step on the image and says, “I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot; it was to share that pain that I carried the cross,” embodies a maternal quality. In its gentle forgiveness of apostasy, its compassionate embrace of the sinner, and its willingness to share in human suffering, this voice manifests the maternal character that Endō himself acknowledged. This study therefore argues that the essence of that moment lies not in theological controversy but in the maternal compassion that transforms sin into an occasion for grace.

A close reading of the passage reveals that Rodrigues does not step on the fumie and then receive forgiveness. Rather, he steps on it after hearing the words “I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot” and “It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world,” and after becoming certain of having already been forgiven. It is this assurance that the path to salvation grounded in maternal mercy remains open that enables him to place his foot upon the bronze image of Christ, the sacred visage he had cherished in his heart throughout his life. In other words, Rodrigues’s act of trampling becomes possible precisely because the stern paternal voice that judges, condemns sin, and enforces obedience to the law is absent.

In Chapter 4, the phrase “Trample! Trample!” first appears when Rodrigues, after the magistrate’s interrogation of Garrpe and himself, witnesses the villagers’ despair upon learning that three hostages must be sent to Nagasaki to face the fumie. Seeing their anguish, Rodrigues impulsively cries out, “Trample! Trample!” (Endō 2015, p. 69). However, the Japanese text reads “Fundemo ii (踏んでもいい)” (Endō 2003, p. 81), which carries a softer nuance—closer to “You may step on it” or “It’s all right if you step on it.” The distinction is important because, while both scenes are rendered identically in English, the original Japanese differentiates them. In Chapter 4, Rodrigues’s utterance implies a hesitant permission rather than a command, reflecting pity rather than authority. Immediately afterward, he realizes the gravity of his words, aware that a priest should never have said such a thing (Endō 2003, pp. 81–82). Thus, when the Christ in bronze later utters “Trample! Trample!” in Chapter 8, the echo of Rodrigues’s earlier statement suggests that even this divine voice may embody the same transgressive compassion—a voice that should not have been spoken but reveals the paradoxical mercy at the heart of Endō’s theology.

In Silence, which dramatizes apostasy as a form of conversion, the merciful maternal voice embodied in “Trample! Trample!” does not entirely supersede the paternal dimension of religion. Yet Rodrigues himself once told the Japanese villagers, “Trample! Trample!,” and later heard what he perceived as the voice of Christ saying the same words to him. As discussed in the introduction, the sacredness that moves the reader in a religious fictional narrative cannot exist independently but emerges only through the secular processes of expression and reception. If the novel’s spiritual power arises from the maternal voice of salvation condensed in the words “Trample! Trample!,” then the fact that this line was first uttered secularly by Rodrigues before being recognized as an inner divine voice is of pivotal significance. Almost like a prophecy, he spoke the words that should never have been spoken—and ultimately enacted them through the fumie. The nuance of the first “Trample! Trample!” (Fundemo ii) suggests “It is permissible to step on it” or “There is no serious harm in doing so,” conveying a tone of hesitant indulgence. By contrast, the second instance (Fumu ga ii) carries a firmer and more decisive tone. If the first represents a deeply maternal utterance, the second retains its maternal gentleness yet adopts a more urging quality. It may thus be said that the second voice deepens the first’s maternal appeal by moving from mere permission to a firmer call for action. Ultimately, the maternal image remains the dominant and enduring presence within the text.

In Endō’s religious narrative, secularization and motherhood are deeply intertwined. The dramatic maternal divinity embodied in the voice “fumu ga ii” is grounded in the fact that Rodrigues himself had earlier spoken the more tenderly maternal phrase “Fundemo ii” to the Japanese villagers in a human, secular voice. This narrative structure mirrors the way Jōdo Shinshū, through its union with the maternal image of Kannon, became widely embraced as a distinctively Japanese form of Buddhism. According to tradition, the founder of Jōdo Shinshū, Shinran (親鸞), once dreamed of the Bodhisattva Kannon, who said: “Even if, due to one’s karmic destiny, the sin of violating a woman is committed, I will personally take the form of a woman to be embraced by you. I will serve you faithfully throughout your life, and at the time of death I will guide you to be born into the Pure Land.” Here, the question of sin is entirely irrelevant; salvation is realized through unconditional forgiveness and acceptance (Kawai 1997, p. 22).

Thus, when interpreted in relation to Buddhism, the maternal voice that opens the path of salvation to Rodrigues through “Trample! Trample!” can be understood as analogous to the secular sacredness of motherhood in Jōdo Shinshū, an embodiment of mercy and redemption that operates within the world rather than apart from it.

3. The Confluence of Apostasy and Tenkō

In the intellectual history of modern Japan, tenkō (転向, ideological conversion) refers to the coerced renunciation of Marxism and socialism under state pressure, particularly during the 1930s.4 As Yoshimoto Takaaki (吉本隆明) notes, this phenomenon represented a collision between traditional Japanese values and Western ideas, where the latter were forced to yield to the indigenous social order (Yoshimoto 1990, p. 285). Although tenkō is primarily a political concept related to the suppression of leftists, its psychological structure—the abandonment of a universal conviction in the face of indigenous cultural power—mirrors the religious apostasy depicted in Silence.

In the novel, the verb “korobu” (転ぶ, literally “to fall down” or “to roll over”) operates as the theological metaphor for this apostasy. As Kishimoto points out, “korobu” was not originally a scholarly or doctrinal term but a colloquial expression used by ordinary people to describe the apostasy of the Kakure Kirishitan (Kishimoto 2009, p. 120). It is worth noting that the same character 転 (turn/roll) also appears in tenkō (転向). While korobu historically referred to the religious capitulation of Christians under the Tokugawa shogunate, Endō employs it to evoke the modern trauma of tenkō. Both terms share the semantic field of a forced “turning away” from a foreign universal truth toward a particularistic Japanese reality.

This connection is not merely interpretative but was recognized by Endō’s contemporaries. Takahashi Kazumi (高橋和巳), a leading leftist novelist, remarked that Silence “bears a heavy ideological meaning,” explicitly linking the novel’s religious theme to the generational experience of ideological conversion (Takahashi 2002, pp. 30–33). For the Japanese intellectuals of the postwar era, the “weakness” of the apostate priest was not a distant theological problem but a reflection of their own wartime compromise.

In the intellectual history of postwar Japan, the study of tenkō was led by Shisō no Kagaku (思想の科学, The Science of Thought), an independent research community headed by Tsurumi Shunsuke (鶴見俊輔). Tsurumi presents a striking example concerning the forced ideological conversions of young Marxists and anarchists who were detained and interrogated by the police. According to Tsurumi, police chiefs were given a manual instructing them on how to induce conversion among imprisoned student radicals. The manual advised that the chief call a student into his office, sit him down at his desk, and, in full view of the student, take money from his own wallet to order oyako-don (親子丼), a popular dish consisting of chicken and scrambled eggs served over rice. The name oyako means “parent and child” in Japanese—the chicken representing the parent and the egg the child—and its appearance was meant to evoke in the student the image of a worried mother concerned for her child’s well-being. During the meal, the chief was instructed never to discuss politics but instead to say something like, “Your mother back home must be worried about you.” Under no circumstances was the father to be mentioned, since any reference to paternal authority risked provoking defiance rather than repentance. The appeal to the forgiving mother, on the other hand, suggested that her compassion might embrace even betrayal, subtly encouraging the student to renounce his convictions. Tsurumi argues that tenkō, which may seem like a purely personal capitulation or an emotional weakness, holds profound philosophical significance because no human being can live a life entirely free from similar moments of psychological “turning.” Everyone, at some point, experiences an inner conversion of this kind (Tsurumi 2001, p. 25).

Regardless of how one evaluates the moral value of tenkō, its structure represents a form of human behavior that can be regarded as universal. Thus, the apostasy depicted in Silence should not be seen as the exceptional act of a particular individual, but as a dramatization of a psychological process potentially shared by all human beings. Another study on tenkō points out that when the term is broadly defined as a change in direction prompted by one’s acknowledgment of the errors in previous thought and action, filial affection—particularly a child’s love for the parent—can function as a psychological weakness. Within this framework, the example of the Kakure Kirishitan can be seen as a kind of prehistory of ideological conversion in Japan (Shisō no Kagaku Kenkyūkai 1962, pp. 372–77). As previously discussed, the Kakure Kirishitan, rather than openly betraying their ancestral faith under state oppression by performing the fumie, constructed a unique form of Christian culture within their everyday lives. Their devotion to Maria Kannon, the maternal figure who forgives and redeems their weakness, thus embodies both resistance and accommodation. For this reason, while the worship of Maria Kannon represents a phenomenon specific to Japan, the psychological structure underlying it, seeking forgiveness through the compassionate mother, can be understood as broadly human and universal.

During the study of tenkō in postwar Japanese intellectual history, the wartime complicity of Japanese Christianity with the emperor system (天皇制) was often examined as a representative example of ideological conversion as well as a religious failure. Under the state’s religious control policies, the United Church of Christ in Japan (日本基督教団, Nihon Kirisuto Kyōdan; hereafter Kyōdan)5 was forcibly unified and began to cooperate actively with nationalist ideology by interpreting the emperor (天皇) as God’s representative and by justifying the war as the will of God. This intellectual and spiritual submission went far beyond a mere distortion of faith. It represented a typical form of tenkō—a capitulation in which religion succumbed to totalitarian authority and internalized its ideology. After the war, Japanese Christianity reflected deeply on this history of collaboration and, in 1967, issued the Confession on the Responsibility during World War II. The Church declared: “From the opening of Christian mission early in the Meiji Era (1868–1912), most Japanese Protestants had long desired to dissolve the various denominations and to establish a single evangelical church in Japan. Therefore, the church leaders of the time, taking advantage of this demand by the government, entered into church union whereby the Kyōdan was formed. When we recognize that the Providence of God, the Lord of History, was at work in the formation and continued existence of the Kyōdan despite our weakness and failings, we not only feel a deep sense of profound gratitude, but with fear, we painfully realize our responsibility.”6

The reason such a situation occurred was that Christianity in Japan, which lacked the social influence of Buddhism or Shintō as a popular religion, perceived the state-imposed unification of churches as an opportunity to expand its missionary organization and strengthen its authority. Amid the wartime mobilization that sought to consolidate all institutions under the banner of total war, the unification of Christian denominations, though carried out under governmental pressure, was seen by many Christians as a positive development for the future of Christianity in Japan.

What is most significant about the tenkō of the United Church of Christ in Japan is that it was not the individual believers who converted ideologically, but the institution itself that underwent conversion as an organization. Under such circumstances, those who were truly able to maintain a critical perspective on totalitarianism and imperialism as Christians were precisely those who did not blindly follow the authority of the Church. In other words, they were the ones who could resist the misguided direction of the institution and, if necessary, walk away from it—the individuals capable of making the decision to commit apostasy (Shisō no Kagaku Kenkyūkai 1960, pp. 339–68).

An essay written by a Japanese Christian reflecting on his wartime collaboration expresses repentance for having supported the emperor system and condoned the war of aggression. The author, a contemporary of Endō’s generation, condemns the prewar and wartime church that had aligned itself with imperial authority. He admits that his own cooperation, along with that of many other Christians, stemmed from weakness. Defining his actions as apostasy, he poses a piercing question: how many Christians of that era could truly claim not to have apostatized? (Andō 1963, p. 115). Should this be dismissed as mere self-justification?

Regarding the motivation for writing Silence, Endō made the following statement:

Even when I look back on the wartime years, the people who lived around me were almost all members of the latter group—that is, the weak. There was not a single Japanese person in my circle who remained strong to the very end. That is why I chose the weak as the protagonists of my novels.

(Endō 2017, pp. 14–15)

The term “the weak” here encompasses figures such as Ferreira, Rodrigues’s mentor, who capitulates to the Tokugawa authorities and writes works denouncing Christianity; Kichijirō, who survives by repeatedly alternating between apostasy and confession of faith; and Rodrigues himself, who responds to the call of “Trample! Trample!” and steps on the fumie. In contrast, Garupe, who upholds his faith to the point of death, represents the strong. As noted earlier, during the Second World War, the unified Japanese Church likewise served the cause of imperialism with active cooperation.

Does this mean that Endō affirms Japan’s imperialism, which mercilessly ruled and killed neighboring peoples, as the collective choice of the weak majority? The answer, in my view, is not so simple. Silence presents another line of inquiry. During Japan’s wartime mobilization, one reason soldiers could carry out (神風) missions, deliberately crashing their aircraft into enemy targets, was the belief that upon death they would be enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine (靖国神社) as spirits who protected the nation. In this way, Japanese imperial ideology extended its reach beyond the living, incorporating even the dead into the logic of the state. For Endō, who often emphasized the generational consciousness shaped by his wartime experience (Endō 2017, p. 14), this was a deeply tragic reality. Through the misguided cooperation of the wartime Church, both the death of believers and the mourning of their families were absorbed into the national order, stripped of any Christian meaning, and redefined within the framework of state ideology.

As briefly noted in the introduction, according to generational studies, the group to which Endō belonged, the senchū sedai (戦中世代) or “wartime generation,” born around the 1920s and having come of age during the war, was characterized by an embodied nationalism and a continuing conflict with postwar democracy (Narita 2016, pp. 62–63). Wartime Japanese nationalism was based on the ideology of Kokutai (国体, national body or structure of the state), which placed the emperor in a divine position and incorporated citizens as parts of his body, subordinating individual life and will to the principles of the state. This ideology was more than a political doctrine; it penetrated the moral, emotional, and bodily sensibilities of the people, justifying a system in which even death could be consecrated to the nation. Kokutai became the ideological foundation of Japan’s wartime totalitarian order. Through the religious language of Shintō, it sought to merge the organization of the state with the individual body, achieving their symbolic identification. The emperor, regarded as both divine and human and worshiped as an Arahitogami (現人神, living god), stood at the apex of this theocratic nationalism and served as its backbone. The belief that the ultimate mission of humanity, which Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and socialism had failed to accomplish, would be fulfilled through the emperor formed the moral and spiritual basis of the wartime state (Tsurumi 2001, p. 65). Endō lived through this period, when many believed without doubt that those who sacrificed their lives for the nation would return as divine spirits enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine.

Endō grew up in wartime Japan, where he witnessed firsthand the danger of a national system that absorbed private mourning into state ideology, transforming death into an object of myth and praise. Having seen countless lives justified as noble sacrifices for the nation, he could not help but question what consequences might arise from an excessive glorification of death or martyrdom. The yearning for sacred martyrdom may seem to sanctify and beautify death, yet such sanctity acquires meaning only when it inspires and transforms the living who continue their secular existence. After the atomic bombings and Japan’s unconditional surrender (無条件降伏) on 15 August 1945, the Japanese people were confronted with the reality of occupation under the General Headquarters (GHQ). This moment marked the forced introduction of Western liberal democracy, the very ideology against which wartime Japan had fought so fiercely. Ōe Kenzaburō (大江健三郎), born in 1935 and later Japan’s second Nobel laureate in literature, confessed that under militarist education he had once believed without doubt in dying for the emperor, but that this belief completely collapsed after the arrival of postwar democracy, making him realize the profound errors of Japan’s wartime imperialism (Ōe 1991, pp. 22–23). For Endō, however, the central issue was not the sense of liberation brought by the influx of Western democracy, as it was for Ōe. What troubled him was a deeper question: why could Japan so readily accept what was foreign, and why did no inner conflict arise between what was its own and what was not?

Endō’s view of “the weak” extends beyond moral judgment to a theological reflection that critically examines the relationship between war, faith, the state, and the individual. He sought to relativize the ethics of the strong, such as the obedience, sacrifice, and martyrdom demanded by national and institutional power, and to discover traces of the divine within the secular existence of those who waver, who survive, and who continue to live while bearing the weight of inner conflict. The ultimate expression of this vision is found in Silence. Thus, the reader must recognize the depth of Rodrigues’s inner turmoil leading up to his act of trampling on the fumie and attend to the life he continues to live afterward, shaped by the struggle that preceded it.

4. The Dialectics of Everyday Life

In Japan, from the Meiji Restoration through the period of modernization that effectively meant Westernization until the defeat in 1945, and even into the postwar years, Marxism functioned less as a political creed and more as a form of intellectual culture that any young intellectual was expected to study. Yet it is important to remember that this was ultimately a culture of knowledge for intellectuals, not for everyone. Not all people are intellectuals. For ordinary people, daily life often takes precedence over the pursuit of intellectual refinement. Similarly, not all Christians are priests like Rodrigues or Ferreira. For ordinary believers, religious faith exists alongside the many practical concerns of everyday life.

Yoshimoto Takaaki classifies tenkō into three distinct forms. The first is the most familiar type, in which an individual abandons their convictions under the pressure of state oppression. The second, however, involves Marxists or anarchists who, despite having endured imprisonment without yielding to coercion, ultimately undergo tenkō in another sense. Yoshimoto argues that for these intellectual Marxists and anarchists, who had adopted Western ideologies, the very act of adhering rigidly to Marxism or anarchism constituted a kind of tenkō—a conversion away from the so-called “feudal” mentality of the Japanese masses that they regarded as backward and in need of overcoming. In both cases, the underlying assumption was that the conflict between Western modernity and Japan’s native feudal ethos could be resolved only by allowing one to absorb and eliminate the other. Yoshimoto’s analysis of tenkō is significant because it does not remain confined to the intellectual sphere of those intoxicated by Western knowledge and cultural superiority; it also takes into account the lived reality and cultural consciousness of the Japanese people who continued to preserve traditional values.

What is particularly striking in Yoshimoto’s framework is his conception of the third form of tenkō. He illustrates this through Nakano Shigeharu (中野重治) ’s short story “The House in the Village” (Mura no Ie, 村の家), written in 1935 based on Nakano’s own experience of tenkō in 1934. In the story, a diligent farmer who has worked hard to send his son to university in Tokyo scolds him for repeatedly being taken to the police station for activities he barely understands, urging him to abandon his political movement. The son replies, “I understand what you’re saying, Father, but I still want to keep on writing” (Yoshimoto 1990, p. 296). This response signals his decision to withdraw from direct political activism as a member of the Communist Party while continuing his struggle through literature. Yoshimoto regards this third form of tenkō as superior to the previous two. Here, tenkō is not the conversion of an intellectual who seeks to lead the masses, but the transformation of an individual who lives among them, someone who continues to uphold their convictions while engaging directly with everyday life and confronting the remnants of feudal tradition from within. Rejecting the notion of realizing one’s beliefs through meaningless death, Yoshimoto saw in this sustained way of living with conviction the true potential for genuine transformation (Yoshimoto 1990, p. 311).

Yoshimoto argues that an individual’s convictions do not necessarily need to be upheld through obedience to an organization. Both the first and second forms of tenkō, he explains, ultimately reduce to a binary choice between betraying or following the Japanese Communist Party. What truly matters for Yoshimoto is not the authority of the organization but the integrity of personal belief. Leaving the Party does not mean one can no longer act in the service of communism. This prioritization of the individual over the collective, as seen in Yoshimoto’s thought, could emerge precisely because, like Endō, he lived through the era of wartime Japan and bore witness to its authoritarian history. Yoshimoto and Endō belong to the same generation.

Yoshimoto rejects the idea of uncritically accepting organizational principles to the extent of embracing death for them. His stance seems to suggest a rhetorical question: how can one hope to transform the world or bring about revolution without first surviving? With this third form of tenkō in mind, the following statement by Endō acquires a new and deeper significance.

There were once people a generation older than mine who had thrown themselves into the leftist movement but eventually left the Party. In order to prove their own worth, they either came to hate the Party they had once belonged to, tried to reject it outright, or continued to cling to it while living on with a lingering sense of guilt. In that sense, Kichijirō seems to me to embody one aspect of the Japanese intellectuals, including those of the generation before mine. If there is such a thing as “the literature of apostasy,” would it not be Kichijirō who embodies it?

(Endō 2017, p. 53)

Here, although the Japanese author Endō refers specifically to the Japanese character Kichijirō, the broader expression “the literature of apostasy” invites us to also consider the apostasy of Rodrigues and Ferreira within the narrative. What is particularly striking in this passage is that Endō describes the act of betrayal not as a betrayal of ideology or belief itself, but rather as a betrayal of the Party.

I will now cite the English translation of Ferreira’s words urging Rodrigues to trample on the fumie.

‘You make yourself more important than them. You are preoccupied with your own salvation. If you say that you will apostatize, those people will be taken out of the pit. They will be saved from suffering. And you refuse to do so. It’s because you dread to betray the Church. You dread to be the dregs of the Church, like me.’ Until now Ferreira’s words had burst out as a single breath of anger, but now his voice gradually weakened as he said: ‘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…’

(Endō 2015, pp. 228–29)

When we closely examine Ferreira’s rebuke of Rodrigues, we see that he accuses him not of fearing to betray Christianity itself, but of fearing to betray the Church. This distinction becomes the catalyst for Rodrigues’s decision. After the fumie, he reflects on his status: “This meant that he had been expelled from the mission. […] I fell. But Lord, you alone know that I did not renounce my faith. [… ] I know that my Lord is different from the God that is preached in the churches.” (Endō 2015, pp. 234–35)

From the institutional Church’s perspective, Rodrigues has lost his qualifications as a priest and missionary. But who can truly declare that he is no longer a Christian? Rodrigues asserts with conviction that he has never abandoned his faith in God. From the perspective of Western Christianity, the birthplace of the religion, Rodrigues, who arrived in a distant island nation of the East as a missionary, may no longer seem fit to carry out God’s mission. Yet might we not reconsider Rodrigues considering Japan’s unique historical context? If we interpret Rodrigues’s inner struggle as a process through which he comes to embody a “Japanized” Christianity, his experience suggests the beginnings of a faith independent of institutional authority, reflecting the same spiritual continuity that sustained the Kakure Kirishitan in their hidden practice of belief.

The author hears in Rodrigues’s inner confession, “Lord, you alone know that I did not renounce my faith,” a clear resonance with Yoshimoto’s third form of tenkō, expressed in the line, “I understand what you’re saying, Father, but I still want to keep on writing.” Both statements convey a rediscovery of conviction that persists after an internal struggle no one else can fully understand. They also signify a rejection of the impulse to glorify death through dogma or to ignore the pain of others. Finally, they voice a prayer grounded in a principle different from that of any organization, a desire to reach the transcendent directly through one’s own faith. This prayer exists because one continues to live. It is, at its core, a plea for the grace to go on living.

Not every aspect of a believer’s life is entirely defined by religion. This does not mean that their religious sentiment is weak or that their faith is lacking. Studies on the Kakure Kirishitan emphasize that while their lives were certainly shaped by faith, they were also ordinary people engaged in everyday labor and livelihood (Ōhashi 2019, p. 195). When Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of Silence was released in 2017, scholarly and public interest in the Kakure Kirishitan surged both in Japan and abroad. Yet some scholars caution against interpreting them through Endō’s binary of strength and weakness, since, as Silence itself implies, such evaluation is ultimately determined by the institutional standards of the Church rather than by the depth of personal faith (Ōhashi 2019, p. 256). The Kakure Kirishitan who survived by performing the fumie were, in one sense, weak, yet by preserving their ancestors’ faith and maintaining their own distinctive form of Christianity, they were also strong. They embody a paradoxical condition, both weak and strong at once.

Therefore, Rodrigues too is both weak and strong. Since this dual aspect of his character takes shape through the act of the fumie, we must pay attention to the post-fumie Rodrigues as well. Endō himself noted that critics often overlook this latter part of the narrative, particularly Chapters 9 and 10 of the English translation and the appended “Diary of an Officer at the Christian Residence” (切支丹屋敷役人日記). He urged readers to consider the life of Okada San’emon, formerly the Portuguese missionary Rodrigues, who now bears a Japanese name and has taken a Japanese wife. Endō explains that in the passage translated as “writing a book” (Endō 2015, p. 260), the original Japanese word shomotsu (書物) should not be read as “book” but as “document.” The document in question was an official oath declaring Christianity to be a heretical religion (邪教) and affirming that its signer no longer practiced it. Yet since Rodrigues, now Okada, had already trampled on the fumie and publicly renounced his faith, his need to sign another oath raises a question that Endō deliberately leaves for the reader to ponder. The implication is that Okada may still have secretly maintained his Christian belief after the fumie (Endō 2017, pp. 60–62). Supporting this interpretation, the diary records that Okada was suspected of attempting to convert Kichijirō, who was living by his side as a servant. Okada is said to have sworn before the magistrate that he had never done so, sealing his oath with a handprint (Endō 2015, p. 263).

In Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of Silence, an additional scene not found in the novel shows Okada’s cremation after his death. As his body is prepared according to Japanese custom, his Japanese wife, who had been forced by the shogunate to marry him, places a rosary in his hands. The film seems to suggest that even while living as Okada, he never abandoned his conviction as a servant of God. After the fumie, Rodrigues relinquished his official mission as a priest within the Church, yet he did not abandon Christianity or his God. It is conceivable that, as a Japanese man living an ordinary life, he may have continued to offer prayers or even heard Kichijirō’s confessions in secret. The wife who surreptitiously placed the rosary in her husband’s hand may herself have been a believer. And perhaps Kichijirō, too, believed that his salvation after the fumie lay in remaining close to Padre Rodrigues (though no longer officially recognized as such), sharing in the quiet faith that endured beneath their outward lives.

In the English translation, the section titled “Diary of an Officer at the Christian Residence” is presented as an appendix, but this structural distinction does not exist in the original Japanese edition. The English version is organized into Chapters 1 through 10 followed by an appendix, whereas the Japanese text consists of Chapters 1 through 9 and “Diary of an Officer at the Christian Residence.” Furthermore, the segment titled “Extracts from the Diary of Jonassen, A Clerk at the Dutch Firm, Dejima, Nagasaki (長崎出島オランダ商館員ヨナセンの日記より),” which appears as Chapter 10 in the English translation, is actually part of Chapter 9 in the Japanese original. In the Japanese edition, the “Diary of an Officer at the Christian Residence” is placed in direct sequence with “Extracts from the Diary of Jonassen,” so that the account of Rodrigues, now living as Okada San’emon, is immediately followed by an external record of his life after the fumie. In contrast, the English translation’s decision to treat the “Diary” as an appendix inevitably positions Rodrigues’s post-fumie life as secondary, almost an afterthought to the main narrative. Yet, as Yamane (2023, pp. 223–59) observes, the spiritual power of Silence arises precisely from the integration of these two dimensions: the inner struggle that reaches its culmination in the fumie, and the quiet, redemptive life that unfolds thereafter.7

Yoshimoto explains the intellectual’s struggle with tenkō as a battle against the sense of isolation from the common people (Yoshimoto 1990, pp. 290–91). The central issue, he argues, lies in how to overcome the gap between the everyday sensibilities of ordinary life and the abstract ideals of intellectual conviction (Yoshimoto 1990, p. 311). The first form of conversion he describes represents simple defeat in the face of this isolation, while the second reflects an indifference to it. The third, however, acknowledges the sense of isolation and seeks a dialectical reconciliation between the traditions embraced by the masses and the beliefs pursued by the individual.

To live a secular life while pursuing religious sanctity, if this can be regarded as one form of the “Japanization” of Christianity, it had already been realized by the Kakure Kirishitan. The person who recognized this was Endō Shūsaku, the author of Silence. Endō was deeply moved by a painting cherished by the Kakure Kirishitan, an image that simultaneously depicted the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus and a peasant woman embracing her nursing child. Watching the Kakure Kirishitan pray before this image, Endō discerned what he believed to be the essence of Japanese religiosity, describing it: “It was the face of women found everywhere on this island, mothers who plowed the fields or mended fishing nets while nursing their babies” (Endō 2013, pp. 216–17). It was a faith lived through inherited, everyday labor, plowing the earth, repairing fishing nets, while inwardly pursuing the sacred ideal of a faith received from beyond Japan.

5. Conclusions: Praying for the “Japanization” of Christianity

In The Theology of the Pain of God (神の痛みの神学, 1946), the eminent Japanese theologian Kitamori Kazō (北森嘉蔵) cites Hibino Shirō (日比野士朗) ’s 1939 war novel Wusong Creek (呉淞クリーク) to illustrate his central claim that human pain is also God’s pain, and that God’s pain, in turn, is inseparable from human suffering (Kitamori 2017, p. 297). A veteran of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Hibino describes the terror of combat as an experience that soldiers could endure only through the faint traces of ordinary life that persisted even amid the battlefield (Hibino 2000, p. 38). By quoting such a passage, Kitamori anchors his postwar theology, conceived in the devastated Japan of 1946, in the hope that the shattered everyday life of the Japanese people might yet become a site of healing. His vision of seeking divine providence through a deeper immersion in divine pain exemplifies the intricate relationship between the sacred and the secular. For those who had endured the Sino-Japanese War, the Second World War, and the suffering of defeat, abstract notions of salvation held little meaning. Salvation had to be discovered within life itself, in the immediacy of daily existence, and that very search, precisely because it was rooted in the ordinary, became more profoundly spiritual than ever before.

Endō challenges the notion that only the strong, those unafraid of martyrdom, deserve a place in history. He declares that his literary mission is to give voice to the countless “cowards” who, despite succumbing to oppression, still struggled in their own ways to preserve faith and conviction (Endō 2016, pp. 106–17). This is why he could never abandon the Kakure Kirishitan, nor could he forsake figures like Rodrigues, Kichijirō, or Ferreira. His compassion for the weak is not merely a narrative theme but also a reflection of his own position as a postwar Japanese writer who lived as one of the “cowards.” Endō did not resist the state’s wartime militarism, nor did he oppose the postwar imposition of Western democracy by the victors, yet he never yielded to the totalitarian control of individual conscience and belief. In this sense, his literature becomes a testimony to the life of a man who endured as a “coward” in history. Endō was not alone. Countless Japanese intellectuals who renounced leftist ideals under state oppression and betrayed their parties to survive were also “cowards.” Likewise, the many ordinary Japanese who lived under air raids, ready to die for the emperor, only to later welcome democracy under occupation, were “cowards” as well. Endō could not erase their pain, but through literature, he sought to accompany them—to act as their companion in weakness (Fujimura 2016, p. 76).

In conclusion, Endō’s Silence serves as a literary testimony for the “weak” who were historically silenced. By interpreting Rodrigues’s apostasy through the framework of tenkō, the novel reveals that betraying the institution can paradoxically be an act of preserving individual faith. This preservation is enabled by the “Japanization” of Christianity, which replaces the paternal judgment of the West with a maternal compassion that embraces the sinner. Ultimately, salvation in Endō’s vision is discovered not in the dramatic death of the martyr but in the resilient daily life of the survivor. This dialectic of the sacred and the secular defines the trajectory through which Japanese Christian literature gains value, asserting that the grace to go on living is itself a testament to the divine.