Discovery of the Coin Image and Execution

In July 1644, the Tokugawa Shogunate's relentless campaign to eradicate Christianity in Japan reached a new peak of savagery with the discovery of a coin bearing the image of a saint in the house of a citizen in Nagasaki. The incident, recorded in the diary of Jonassen, a clerk at the Dutch firm on Dejima, reveals the systematic brutality of the persecution and the tragic position of the apostate priest Sebastian Rodrigues, who was forced to witness the consequences of a faith he had publicly renounced.

Discovery and Arrest

On July 9, 1644, an image of the Virgin Mary was discovered in a citizen's house in Nagasaki. The entire household was immediately sent to prison and subjected to cross-examination. The authorities then traced and arrested the man who had sold them the forbidden object. The apostate priests, Christovao Ferreira (known as Sawano Chuan) and Sebastian Rodrigues, were present at the inquisition to identify the objects as Christian. This was not an isolated incident; three months earlier, a coin bearing a saint's image had been found in another house, leading to the arrest of that household as well. The regime's vigilance was extreme, and the presence of the apostate priests as expert witnesses was a calculated humiliation, forcing them to participate in the destruction of the very faith they had once served.

Torture and Execution

The family from the earlier coin incident—a man, his wife, and their two sons—refused to apostatize despite being put to torture. Rodrigues, who was among the witnesses, repeatedly appealed for mercy to the government, but his pleas were not heard. The sentence was death. The parents and their two sons had half of their heads shaven and were paraded through the town on the backs of lean horses for four days. The parents were then executed by being hung up by the feet, a method that echoed the pit torture (ana-tsurushi) that had broken so many others. The sons were put back into prison after witnessing this sight. On August 7, 1644, the two sons were bound, carried on the backs of lean horses past the Dutch firm, and taken to the execution ground, where they were beheaded. The entire family was annihilated for possessing a single coin.

Rodrigues' Role and the System of Persecution

Rodrigues' presence at these events was a direct consequence of his own apostasy. After trampling on the fumie, he was given a Japanese name, Okada San'emon, and a house in Nagasaki's Sotouramachi district. He was regularly summoned to the magistrate's office to identify Christian objects brought in by foreigners from Macao, a task he shared with Ferreira. This role forced him into a position of complicity with the persecutors, a daily reminder of his fall. The system of persecution was thorough and incentivized: an announcement posted at the Mountain Villa in Edo offered rewards of 300 pieces of silver for informing on a father, 200 for a brother, and 100 for a lay Christian. The discovery of the coin image and the subsequent execution were not anomalies but part of a calculated, bureaucratic machinery designed to crush any vestige of Christian faith.

Significance and Thematic Resonance

The incident of the coin image and the execution of the family serves as a stark illustration of the novel's central themes. It demonstrates the absolute silence of God in the face of suffering, a silence that tormented Rodrigues. The peasants, like those in Tomogi and Goto, died for a faith that, according to Ferreira and Inoue, had already been twisted and changed by the "swamp of Japan." Inoue had argued that the God the Japanese peasants secretly served had gradually changed so as to be no longer like the Christian God at all. Yet, the family's refusal to apostatize, even under torture, stands as a powerful testament to a faith that, however transformed, remained potent enough to inspire a martyr's death. Rodrigues, the "Apostate Paul," was forced to watch as others achieved the glorious martyrdom he had once dreamed of, his own weakness and the regime's cunning having denied him that fate. The event encapsulates the novel's tragic vision: a faith that could inspire such sacrifice, yet was systematically destroyed by a state that saw it as a foreign threat, leaving only silence and the memory of blood.