Egami

Egami is a village in the Goto Islands, a remote archipelago off the coast of Kyushu, Japan. During the Tokugawa Shogunate's systematic persecution of Christianity in the 17th century, Egami became one of the few places where the faith survived in secret. The village, along with neighboring districts like Odomari, Miyahara, and Dozaki, outwardly conformed to Buddhism while its inhabitants remained Christians, a fact barely hidden from the authorities. For a long, long time, these villagers had been awaiting the day when priests would once again come across the distant sea to help them and give them a blessing.

The Christian Community and Its Faith

The Christians of Egami were poor farmers and fishermen who eked out a living from the land and sea. Like the peasants of Tomogi, they lived in crushing poverty, their lives shaped by heavy taxation and the absolute power of the feudal lords. The Buddhist bonzes treated them like cattle, and for a long time they had just lived in resignation to such a fate. The Christian teaching offered them a different path, a path in which they could cast away the fetters that bound them. They taught their little children their prayers and waited for the day a priest would come. When Rodrigues arrived, they came to him like an army marching through the parched desert and then arriving at an oasis of water, thirsty and longing for refreshment.

Rodrigues's Ministry in Egami

After being led to the Goto Islands by Kichijiro, Rodrigues found himself completely overwhelmed with work in Egami. He baptized children and heard the confessions of adults, working all day long without even time for sleep. The crumbling farmhouse he used as a chapel was jammed tight with bodies, and even the sick crawled in to meet him. The peasants pressed him for crucifixes, medals, or holy pictures, and when he had none, he unfastened his rosary and gave them the beads one by one. He taught them how to form the secret organization that the people of Tomogi had devised—choosing a Jiisama to baptize and Tossama to instruct the faithful—and they took to this method with great enthusiasm, wrangling among themselves like the people of Lisbon at election time.

The Swamp of Japan

The novel's broader theme of Japan as a "swamp" that absorbs and distorts foreign ideologies is exemplified by the fate of Christianity in places like Egami. The translator's preface notes that Japan is a swamp because it sucks up all sorts of ideologies, transforming them into itself and distorting them in the process. Inoue, the magistrate, later declares 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 have been cut, and the sapling withers. This idea is echoed by Ferreira, who argues that the Japanese twisted and changed the Christian God, creating something different—a butterfly caught in a spider's web, with only the external form remaining. The very word "Deus" was freely changed by the Japanese into "Dainichi" (The Great Sun), a confusion that persisted even after the vocabulary was corrected.

Narrative Significance

Egami represents the fragile, hidden life of Christianity in Japan during the persecution. It is a place where the faith was kept alive by the desperate devotion of the peasants, but also where the seeds of its transformation were sown. The village's story illustrates both the heroic endurance of the Japanese Christians and the cultural forces that would ultimately reshape their religion into something the missionaries could no longer recognize. The interpreter who debated Rodrigues had himself learned Christian doctrine in the seminary and argued that it ought not to be introduced into Japan, a sentiment that reflects the deep resistance the faith encountered in the Japanese "swamp."