Shusaku Endo , Japanese Christian writer, 1923-1996

Towards the end of the 1500's, the shoguns required that Christians renounce their faith, and began to harass any who disobeyed.

The first executions soon followed, and the age of Japanese Christian martyrs began. Japanese Christians who refused to renounce their faith were hunted down and killed. Some were force-marched into the sea; others were bound and tossed off rafts; still others were hung upside down over a pit full of dead bodies and excrement.

"The blood of Christians is the seed of the church," said Tertullian.

Men may mean it for evil, but God can use men's evil for good.

A museum in the city of Nagasaki houses remnants from the age of Japanese Christian martyrs.

One of the displays was a real "fumie" with hundreds of imprints of toes. A fumie was a plate with the picture of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ.
Christians who stepped on the fumie were set "free". Those who refused to step on the picture were tortured and eventually killed.

In the 1950s, a teenager named Shusaku Endo used to visit that museum and stand alone staring at the displays. Would I have stepped on the fumie? he wondered. What did those people feel as they apostatized? What kind of people were they?

Although he had never had to face the wrath of the shoguns, ever since childhood he had felt a tension of faith. Externally, he was a Christian; but what was he underneath?
At the age of ten, Endo had returned to Japan from Manchuria with his mother. In order to please his mother, Endo went along with her conversion and also 'converted'. But had he meant it? he wondered.

He later likened his faith at that time to an arranged marriage. He tried to leave it --for Marxism, for atheism, for a time even contemplating suicide--but his attempts failed. He could not live with this arranged wife; but he could not live without her. Meanwhile, she kept loving him, and to his surprise, eventually he grew to love her in return.

As a Christian teenager in prewar Japan, where the church comprised less than 1 percent of the population, he suffered what he called "the anguish of an alien." Classmates bullied him for his association with what they called a Western religion (although Jesus was actually of Middle Eastern nationality).

The war magnified Shusako Endo's sense of alienation as Christians from other countries bombed his country. After the war, he travelled to France to study French Catholic novelists. Yet France did not make him feel welcome either: as one of the first Japanese overseas exchange students, he was spurned this time on account of race, not faith. There had been a stream of anti-Japanese propaganda during the war, and Endo found himself abused by fellow Christians.

Endo fell into depression. To complicate matters, he contracted tuberculosis, had a lung removed, and spent months in hospitals.

He concluded that Christianity had made him ill.

Rejected by non-Christians and rejected by Christians, he underwent a crisis of faith.

Before returning to Japan, though, Endo visited Palestine to research the life of Jesus, and while there he made a transforming discovery: Jesus, too, knew rejection. More, Jesus' life was defined by rejection.
Jesus' neighbors laughed at him, his family questioned his sanity, his closest friends betrayed him, and his fellow citizens traded his life for that of a common criminal. Throughout his ministry, Jesus purposely gravitated toward the poor and the rejected: he touched those with leprosy whom no one else wanted to touch, dined with the unclean, forgave thieves, adulterers, and prostitutes.

This new insight into Jesus Christ hit Endo with the force of revelation. From the faraway vantage point of Japan he had viewed Christianity as a triumphant, Constantinian faith, admired photos of the grand cathedrals of Europe, and dreamed of living in a nation where one could be a Christian without disgrace. Now, as he studied the Bible, he saw that Christ himself had "disgrace".

Jesus -- God become man , the Creator who came to be rejected by His own creation -- was the Suffering Servant, as depicted by Isaiah: "despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces".

This Jesus could understand the rejection Endo himself was going through.
Endo returned to Japan with his faith intact, yet sensing the need to reshape it. "Christianity, to be effective in Japan, must change," he decided.

He began writing novels in order to work out these issues in print.
He became Japan's best-known living writer, his books were translated into 25 languages, and his name mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He became prominent in newspapers and magazines, and for a time he even hosted a television talk show.

Not the least of the paradoxes surrounding Endo is that no important novelist today works so unashamedly and exclusively with overt Christian themes. Overt Christians in Japan still do not exceed 1 percent of the population, which makes it all the more remarkable that Endo's books land on the National Best-seller lists.
Within Japan, he has helped writers and intellectuals find their way into the church. Outside Japan, he has shed new light on the faith.

In the early novels, Endo portrays Japan as a kind of swampland that swallows up all that is foreign, including Christianity. "Yellow Man" shows a French missionary abandoning his priesthood in order to marry a Japanese woman, and then later choosing suicide. In "Volcano," the foreign priest turned seducer, enticing others to give up their faith.
In "The Sea and the Poison," Endo explores his fellowmen's insensitivity to sin by basing his plot on an actual incident involving the vivisection of a captured American in World War II.

In time, though, the novelist Endo seemed to find a path out of the swampland. Japanese writers have the custom of spinning off light, entertaining works in between their more serious books. A new figure emerged from Endo: the good-hearted fool, a Japanese comic version of Dostoevsky's "The Idiot."
"The Wonderful Fool" presents a bumbling, horse-faced missionary who offends his hosts, commits cultural faux pas, and seems attracted to wrong people: a prostitute, an old hermit, a murderer. Nevertheless, his bumbling/ loving actions rekindle life for those he contacts:
the forgiving love of Gaston moves the murderer (named Endo!) to repentance.
Gaston brought a new ethic of grace ... irrational Christian love directed toward those who do not deserve it...

"The Samurai" and "Silence" reflect the clash of cultures which works itself out. Both novels reflect actual historical events and characters from the early 1600s, when shoguns were persecuting the Christian community in Japan.

"The Samurai" takes place as the shoguns are reconsidering their ecomonic policies of exchange with the West. A priest leads four samurai on a trade mission to Mexico and Europe where, hoping to enhance the success of their trade mission, the samurai become nominal Christians. However, Japan closes its borders, and upon their return they are executed as traitors.

At least one of the samurai, though, may grasp the true meaning of a martyr's death. His servant Yozo speaks to him of Jesus -- not the triumphant, resurrected Christ, but rather the rejected One whom Endo himself had come to know on his visits to Palestine.

The samurai dies with these words from Yozo in his ears: "From now on he will be beside you."

In "Silence", word has filtered back to Jesuit headquarters that the most famous missionary in Japan, Father Ferreira, has apostatized. Rodrigues, who had studied under Father Ferreira in seminary, cannot believe it possible that the man would have renounced the faith after years of courageous service. He sets sail from Portugal to Japan on a dangerous trip to find Ferreira, knowing that hardship lies ahead.
Rodrigues survives hardship to reach Japan, and upon arrival he comes into contact with secret Christians. One of these Christians, Kichijiro, a cunning fisherman, turns in Rodrigues to the shogun for a reward.

Rodrigues holds on to his faith under personal torture.
He further refuses to recant when faced with an unbearable moral situation.
Groups of Christians are led to him. If he steps on the fumie, he is told, they will be set free. He refuses, and they are killed.
The theme of silence seems to pervades the novel. Over 100 times it seems that Rodrigues sees the haunting face of Jesus, whom he loves and serves; but the face never speaks.
It remains silent when he is chained to a tree to watch the Christians die, and silent when he asks for guidance on whether to step on the fumie.
One night Rodrigues hears a sound like snoring. The sound, actually moans, comes from Christians hanging upside down over pits, their ears slit so that blood will drip and they will die a slow, agonizing death. These, too, can be set free, if Rodrigues will only recant. Rodrigues has been warned about this torture by Ferreira, who visited him in his cell. To his horror, he learned that Ferreira had indeed recanted. Ferreira urged Rodrigues, too, to do so. It is just a symbol, an external act. He need not really mean it.

Endo later explained that Silence was misinterpreted because of its title. "People assume that God was silent," he said, when in fact God does speak in the novel.

Here is the decisive scene when silence is broken, at the moment when Rodrigues is contemplating whether to step on the fumie:
"It is only a formality. What do formalities matter?" The interpreter urges him on. "Only go through with the exterior form of trampling."
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. 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.

When "Silence" first appeared, in 1966, many Japanese Catholics responded with outrage. More sympathetic critics, however, pointed out that the novel ends ambiguously and that possibly Rodrigues has recanted only formally while in fact retaining his faith.

Endo himself locates the theme of the novel in the transformation of the face of Jesus, not the transformation of the characters. "To me the most meaningful thing in the novel is the change in the hero's image of Christ," he says. Formerly, Rodrigues had believed only in a Jesus of majesty and power.
Gradually, though, as Rodrigues's mission fails, the face of Jesus begins to change into one marked by human suffering, "the face of a crucified man ...heavy with mud and with stubble... the face of a haunted man, filled with uneasiness and exhaustion".

From that point on, the novel uses words like suffering, worn down, and ugly to describe the face of Jesus.

And Jesus speaks to Rodrigues.

The intention behind Endo's transformed image of Jesus comes to light in his nonfiction work, "A Life of Jesus." The book sold 300,000 copies and is , for many Japanese, their primary introduction to the Christian faith.

Shusaku Endo believes that Christianity has failed to make much impact on Japan because the Japanese have heard only one side of the story: the beauty and the majesty. But somehow, the Japanese have missed another side: of a God who "made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant"; who wept for the sin of mankind.

Endo explains that his point of contact with Japanese unbelievers centres on failure and shame, because in his culture these leave lasting impact on a person's life. He hoped that they would comprehend love, grace, trust, and truth in the experience of their opposites.

The most poignant legacy of Jesus was his unquenchable love, even for -- especially for -- people who betrayed him.

One by one, Jesus' disciples deserted him; still he loved them. His nation had him executed. Jesus roused himself for the cry, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." This is the Jesus who speaks from the fumie.

To those scandalized by the apparent apostasy of Rodrigues, Endo points to the two great founders of the Christian church: Peter denied Christ three times and Paul led the first persecution of Christians. God's grace had extended to these two in order for them to build the New Testament Church.

According to Endo, many Japanese had misunderstandings about the Fatherhood of God. Japan, a nation of authoritarian fathers, has understood the disciplinarian aspect of God's love but not the gracious and unconditional aspect.

An old Japanese saying lists the four most awful things on earth as "fires, earthquakes, thunderbolts, and fathers."

For Christianity to appeal to the Japanese, Endo concludes, it must stress instead the unconditional love of God, the love that forgives wrongs and binds wounds and draws, rather than forces, others to itself, the grace of God
("O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!")

"Christ comes to prostitutes, worthless people, misshapen people and forgives them," says Endo. "God is a God who asks that His children be forgiven."

Some will find Endo's portrayal of Jesus incomplete. He says nothing of Jesus' miracles. He leaves out scenes that show Jesus' authority and power. To critics who judge Endo's theology harshly, he replies, "I highlighted the particular aspect of love in order to make Jesus understandable to my countrymen and to demonstrate that Jesus is not alien to their religious sensibilities."

(c) adapted from an article by Philip Yancey about the works that inspired him to write his own novel "The Jesus I Never Knew"