Dozaki

Dozaki is a village on the Goto Islands, a cluster of islands west of Kyushu, where Sebastian Rodrigues secretly ministered to hidden Christians after his arrival in Japan. The village, like others in the region, outwardly conformed to Buddhist practices while secretly maintaining Christian faith, a duality that became a central theme in Endo's novel. The Christians of Dozaki, along with those of neighboring villages such as Miyahara and Egami, had preserved their faith for years without priests, relying on a clandestine organization of lay leaders. They had been awaiting the day when priests would once again cross the distant sea to help them and give them a blessing. Rodrigues' visit to Dozaki was prompted by two peasants who had traveled from the Goto Islands, a two-day journey, to find him in Tomogi, one of them with blood-stained feet from the climb. They told him that the villagers had succeeded in escaping the vigilance of the officials and were still Christians to a man. The peasants of Dozaki, like those of Tomogi, were poor farmers who eked out a living by cultivating potatoes and wheat in little fields, and the yearly tax exacted by the magistrate of Nagasaki was bitterly high. The reason Christianity had penetrated this territory like water flowing into dry earth was that it had given to this group of people a human warmth they never previously knew. For the first time they had met men who treated them like human beings. It was the human kindness and charity of the fathers that touched their hearts. The Buddhist bonzes simply treated them like cattle, and for a long time they had just lived in resignation to such a fate. What the Japanese peasants were looking for in the priest was a path in which they could cast away the fetters that bound them. Rodrigues baptized thirty adults and children in Dozaki, and heard more than fifty confessions. He also taught the villagers how to form the secret organization that the people of Tomogi had devised, choosing a Jiisama and Tossama to continue teaching catechism to their young people and children. The peasants eagerly pressed him for crucifixes, medals, or holy pictures, and when he had none, he gave them beads from his rosary. This eagerness made him uneasy, wondering if there was not some error in their outlook. The interpreter who later debated Rodrigues in the hut on the island, a former seminarian, argued that Christian doctrine was something forced on people who did not want it, and that Japan had its own religion. He claimed that the fathers always ridiculed the Japanese, and that Father Cabral had nothing but contempt for everything Japanese, despising their houses, language, food, and customs. This interpreter, who had been baptized but never wished to be a Christian, represented the resentment of those who felt that Christianity was a foreign imposition. The swamp of Japan, as Inoue later explained, was a place where the sapling of Christianity could not take root, and where the God whom the peasants secretly served had gradually changed so as to be no longer like the Christian God at all. The Christianity brought to Japan had changed its form and become a strange thing. Dozaki, as a site of this transformation, embodies the novel's central conflict between the universal claims of Christianity and the particular, resistant soil of Japanese culture.