Nagasaki

Nagasaki is the primary urban setting of Shusaku Endo's Silence, a city that functions as the administrative and symbolic center of the Tokugawa Shogunate's campaign to eradicate Christianity. It is the seat of the magistrate's power, the site of the most brutal tortures and executions, and the final, inescapable home for the priests who apostatize. The city embodies the novel's central conflict: the confrontation between a foreign faith and the implacable, absorbing power of the Japanese state and culture, which Inoue, the Lord of Chikugo, calls the 'swamp of Japan'.

The Seat of Persecution and Power

Nagasaki is the headquarters of the anti-Christian campaign. The magistrate's office, located in the Hakata district, is where prisoners are interrogated and sentenced. It is here that the interpreter boasts to Rodrigues that he has met many fathers and that the magistrate Inoue has a plan to make him apostatize. The city is also the location of the prison where Rodrigues is held, a newly built structure on a hill surrounded by trees, from which he can hear the sounds of construction and the song of the turtle-dove. The city's streets are the stage for the public humiliation of captured priests, who are paraded on bare-backed horses through crowds that throw stones and manure, a spectacle designed to break their spirit and deter the faithful. The city's very geography, with its many hills and narrow slopes like Sotouramachi, becomes a landscape of confinement and surveillance.

The Site of Torture and Execution

The most horrific instruments of persecution are located in and around Nagasaki. The pit torture, or ana-tsurushi, is administered here, a method so effective that it broke Christovao Ferreira after six hours of agony. The groaning of Christians suspended in the pit is heard by Rodrigues from his cell, a sound he initially mistakes for the snoring of a guard. The city's outskirts are the site of mass executions, such as the water punishment of Mokichi and Ichizo at the beach of Tomogi, a village near Nagasaki. The one-eyed Christian, Chokichi, is beheaded in the prison courtyard in Nagasaki, his body dragged to a hole the Christians themselves had dug. The bay of Nagasaki is where Francisco Garrpe and three Christians, including Monica, are drowned, their bodies wrapped in straw mats and pushed into the deep water. These events establish Nagasaki as a place of relentless, state-sanctioned death.

The Crucible of Apostasy

Nagasaki is the city where the two central apostasies of the novel occur. Christovao Ferreira, after thirty-three years of missionary work, renounces his faith here and takes the Japanese name Sawano Chuan, living in the Teramachi district near the Saishoji temple. He collaborates with the authorities, writing a book to refute Christianity and translating works on astronomy. It is in Nagasaki that Rodrigues, after his own capture, is brought to the magistrate's office and, guided by Ferreira, places his foot on the fumie, the image of Christ. The city thus becomes the place where the priests' identities are unmade and remade, where they are stripped of their European names and given Japanese ones, and where they are forced to confront the silence of God in the face of immense suffering.

The City of the Apostate Paul

After his apostasy, Rodrigues is given the Japanese name Okada San'emon and lives under house arrest in Nagasaki's Sotouramachi district. He is known derisively as the 'Apostate Paul' by the local children, who throw stones at his window. He is summoned to the magistrate's office to identify Christian objects and is eventually sent to the Christian Residence in Edo. The city of Nagasaki, which once had eleven churches and two hundred thousand Christians, is now a place where the former priest lives a hollow existence, leaning against his window and watching the people pass by. The city's transformation from a thriving center of Christianity to a place of systematic persecution and enforced apostasy mirrors the novel's central tragedy. The annual fumie ceremony, performed by all citizens on January 4th, is a ritual that confirms the city's complete subjugation to the state's anti-Christian policy, a practice that continues long after the priests have been silenced.