4 Those who refuse to trample reveal their secret identites as Christians and may be executed. To test secret Christians, leaders of the Tokugawa shogunate present a fumi-eto be trampled by Japanese subjects. The Jesuits enter Japan and hide in a village through the aid of a cowardly Japanese man named Kichijiro. Sebastian Rodrigues and Francisco Garrpe, set out to discover the truth. 3 Rumours of esteemed Jesuit Fr. Christovao Ferreira apostatizing under torture have reached Rome and his former pupils, Frs. 2 Summary of SilenceĬhristianity was completely banned in the 1630s resulting in matyrdoms of Japanese Christians and apostasies. 1 Both interpretations are valid for a surface level reading of Silence but there is a depth to the novel missed in many interpretations. The controversial nature of the novel and the film has yielded negative reviews which claim the message of Endō’s work is the justification of apostasy and positive reviews which praise the moral ambiguity inherent in the novel devoid of clear black and white solutions. Shūsaku Endō’s novel, Silence, takes place during the shogunate’s persecution of Christians in the 1640s when many Japanese Christians died for the faith. Today marks the 420th anniversary of the twenty-six Japanese martyrs of Nagasaki in 1597 under the Tokugawa shogunate.
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