Silence, by Shusaku Endo, and Japanese Catholicism: an invention of the West?

Abstract

In his novel Silence, Shusaku Endo (1912-1996) presents an excerpt from the history of the beginning of Catholicism in Japan, in the 19th century. XVII, when Christians are being persecuted by the shogunate, with the main character the missionary Sebastião Rodrigues. Through the trajectory of the Jesuit, Endo will raise a series of questions about the absorption of the Catholic religion in Japan. One of his arguments is that Japan is a kind of swamp that absorbs alien cultural influences, but “metabolizes” them and transforms them into a new reality. This would make the situation of the Japanese Christian very particular, having to live out his faith in a total lack of cultural references. We will try to analyze this approach based on Edward B. Said's ideas about the “creation” of the East by the West of the European colonizers and trying to adapt it to the Japanese cultural context.