Miyahara

Miyahara is a village in the Goto Islands, a remote archipelago off the coast of Kyushu, that becomes a crucial site in Sebastian Rodrigues' underground mission after his arrival in Japan. When Rodrigues first reaches the Goto Islands, he finds that the villagers of Miyahara, along with those in neighboring districts such as Odomari, Dozaki, and Egami, have outwardly conformed to Buddhism while secretly maintaining their Christian faith. They have been waiting for years for a priest to return across the sea, and their longing is so intense that Rodrigues is immediately overwhelmed with work, baptizing children and hearing confessions from dawn until night, with the faithful coming to him "like an army marching through the parched desert and then arriving at an oasis of water."

Life and Faith in Miyahara

The peasants of Miyahara, like those in Tomogi, live in extreme poverty, eking out a miserable existence by cultivating potatoes and wheat in tiny fields, with no rice paddies, and paying harsh taxes to the magistrate of Nagasaki. Rodrigues observes that these people "work like horses and cattle; and like horses and cattle they have died." The Christian faith has taken root among them because it offers a human warmth and dignity they had never known, treating them as human beings rather than beasts. The Buddhist bonzes, Rodrigues notes, "simply treat them like cattle," and the peasants have long lived in resignation to their fate. For the first time, in Christianity, they find a path that allows them to cast off the fetters that bind them.

Rodrigues' Ministry and the Secret Organization

During his time in Miyahara, Rodrigues baptizes thirty adults and children in a single day, and hears more than fifty confessions. The Christians make their way through the mountains from Miyahara, Kuzushima, and Haratsuka to reach him. He teaches them how to form the secret organization that the Christians of Tomogi had devised when deprived of priests: choosing a Jiisama to lead and baptize, and Tossama to instruct the faithful in prayer and catechism. The villagers take to this method with great enthusiasm, even wrangling among themselves like "the people of Lisbon at election time" over who should hold the posts of honor. Kichijiro, who has accompanied Rodrigues, stubbornly puts himself forward for any position of authority.

The Swamp of Japan and the Fate of Christianity

Miyahara, like all the villages where Christianity has been planted, exists within the larger context of Japan as a "swamp" that absorbs and transforms foreign ideologies. The novel's translator notes that Japan is a swamp because it "sucks up all sorts of ideologies, transforming them into itself and distorting them in the process." This metaphor is central to understanding why, despite the fervent faith of the Miyahara Christians, the roots of Christianity are ultimately cut. Inoue, the Lord of Chikugo, later explains that the God whom the peasants of Goto and Ikitsuki secretly serve has gradually changed, becoming no longer like the Christian God at all. The sapling of Christianity, planted in this swamp, withers and dies, its form twisted and changed by the Japanese cultural soil. The very word "Deus" was confused by the Japanese with "Dainichi" (The Great Sun), and even after the vocabulary was corrected, the twisting and changing secretly continued. The Christianity that the peasants of Miyahara believe in, Ferreira argues, is like a butterfly caught in a spider's web: only the external form remains, but the blood and flesh are gone.