1579

The year 1579 stands as a decisive turning point in the history of Christianity in Japan, marking the first visit of the Italian Jesuit Alessandro Valignano, the true architect of the Japanese mission. Valignano arrived to find a flourishing community of some 150,000 Christians, whose deep faith inspired in him the vision of a totally Christian island in the north of Asia. This year initiated a period of unprecedented missionary expansion, but also sowed the seeds of the cultural and theological tensions that would later erupt into violent persecution, forming the essential backdrop to the story of Sebastian Rodrigues and the other priests in Silence.

Valignano's Vision and the Mission's Golden Age

Valignano united Xavier's enthusiasm with remarkable foresight and tenacity of purpose. Upon his first visit in 1579, he was struck by the sterling qualities of the Japanese Christians and promptly set about purging the mission of excessive foreign barbarian influence. He dispatched to Macao Francisco Cabral, who strongly opposed the plan of an indigenous Japanese Church, and began founding seminaries, colleges, and a novitiate to entrust the infant Church to a local clergy with all possible speed. Soon, daimyos in Kyushu embraced the Christian faith, bringing with them a great part of their subjects, and a thriving Japanese clergy took shape. Valignano's dream was that of a sober realist, not a castle in the air.

The Missionary Context and the 'Swamp' of Japan

The missionary effort initiated in this period was set against the Sengoku Period, when Japan, torn by strife among warring daimyos, had no strong central government. This distressful situation allowed missionaries, when persecuted in one fief, to quickly move elsewhere. However, unification was close at hand, and Japan was soon to be welded into a solid monolith. The architects of unity—Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu—were all on intimate terms with the Portuguese Jesuits, motivated partly by desire for trade with the black ships from Macao, partly by a deep dislike of Buddhism, and partly by the fascination of these cultured foreigners. From 1570 until 1614, the missionaries held such a privileged position at the court of the Bakufu that their letters and reports are now the chief source of information for a period of history about which Japanese sources say little. The optimism of Valignano seemed to have ample justification.

The Seeds of Conflict and the 'Swamp' Metaphor

Yet this period of success also contained the roots of later tragedy. The very prosperity of the mission, and the unquestioning obedience of Christian subjects to their foreign guides, eventually aroused the suspicion of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The novel's central metaphor—that Japan is a 'swamp' that cannot absorb a foreign Christianity—is directly linked to this era. The interpreter who debates with Rodrigues recalls that Father Cabral had nothing but contempt for everything Japanese, despising their houses, language, food, and customs, and even those who graduated from the seminary were not allowed to become priests. This attitude, born in the early mission, fueled resentment. The interpreter himself, a former seminarian, angrily tells Rodrigues that the fathers always ridiculed the Japanese, a legacy of the very period Valignano sought to reform. The sapling of Christianity, planted with such hope in 1579, would later be seen by the apostate Ferreira as a butterfly caught in a spider's web, its true reality lost, leaving only a skeleton.

The Enduring Legacy: A Changed God

The year 1579 also marks the beginning of a process of cultural and theological transformation that would ultimately define the fate of Christianity in Japan. The peasants of Tomogi, whom Rodrigues encounters, live in poverty and squalor, working like horses and cattle. The reason the religion penetrated this territory like water flowing into dry earth was that it gave these people a human warmth they never previously knew. Yet, as Ferreira later argues, the Japanese twisted and changed the Christian God, creating something different. Even in the glorious missionary period, the Japanese who confused 'Deus' with 'Dainichi' (The Great Sun) began to create a distortion of the faith. The magistrate Inoue, himself a former Christian, would later declare that the God whom the peasants of Goto and Ikitsuki secretly serve has gradually changed so as to be no longer like the Christian God at all. The roots of this transformation, which Ferreira and Inoue both see as the inevitable outcome of planting Christianity in the 'swamp' of Japan, were laid in the very success of the mission that Valignano oversaw from 1579 onward.