hour of the Monkey

The hour of the Monkey, the period roughly between three and five in the afternoon, is the time of day recorded for the death of Okada San'emon, the Japanese name taken by the apostate Portuguese priest Sebastian Rodrigues. This single temporal notation, preserved in the official diary of the Christian Residence in Edo, closes the earthly life of a man who had once crossed oceans to bring Christianity to Japan and who ended his days as a prisoner, a collaborator, and a figure of profound ambiguity. The hour of the Monkey, a unit of the traditional Japanese timekeeping system, thus becomes the final marker of a life that had been measured by the rhythms of the Mass, the seasons of the Church, and the long silences of God.

The Hour of the Monkey in the Official Record

The diary entry for the Ninth Year of Enpo, Gold-Junior-Cock, states that Okada San'emon died of illness at two or three past the hour of the Monkey on the twenty-fifth of July. The precision of the notation—not merely a day but a specific hour within it—reflects the bureaucratic thoroughness of the Tokugawa Shogunate's surveillance system. The report was immediately submitted to the Lord, and managers were sent from the Lord's residence. The corpse was kept under constant watch by three policemen. The hour of the Monkey thus anchors the moment when the state's machinery of documentation and control registered the end of a man who had been under its authority for more than thirty years.

The Hour of the Monkey and the Persecution Apparatus

The hour of the Monkey, as a unit of time, belongs to the same system of order that structured the persecution of Christianity in Japan. The same bureaucratic logic that recorded Rodrigues' death at the hour of the Monkey also produced the edicts that expelled missionaries, the schedules for torture, and the rewards for informants. The 1614 Edict of Expulsion declared that the Kirishitan band had come to Japan to overthrow true doctrine and change the government. The reward system offered three hundred pieces of silver for information on a priest, two hundred for a brother, and one hundred for a lay Christian. The prohibition of fences and hedges between houses was a decree designed to make every neighbor a potential informant. The hour of the Monkey, in this context, is not merely a time of day but a unit of a system that sought to regulate every aspect of life, including the moment of death.

The Hour of the Monkey and the Swamp of Japan

The hour of the Monkey, as a Japanese temporal marker, also resonates with the novel's central metaphor of the swamp of Japan. Inoue, the Lord of Chikugo, tells Rodrigues that he was not defeated by Inoue but by the swamp of Japan itself. Ferreira, the apostate former provincial, had earlier described Japan as a swamp where the sapling of Christianity rots at the roots. The hour of the Monkey, a native Japanese time unit, is the temporal frame within which Rodrigues' life ends, just as the Japanese cultural and political swamp was the frame within which his faith was transformed and ultimately extinguished. The diary entry that records his death at the hour of the Monkey is itself a product of that swamp—a document written in Japanese, using Japanese names and Japanese timekeeping, by a Japanese official who had no interest in the Christian God.

The Hour of the Monkey and the Silence of God

The hour of the Monkey, as a specific time of day, also stands in contrast to the liturgical hours that had once structured Rodrigues' life as a priest. He had celebrated Mass at dawn, recited the Divine Office at the canonical hours, and prayed the Stations of the Cross. The hour of the Monkey, however, is a secular, Japanese hour, devoid of any Christian significance. It is the hour when the cicada sings, when the afternoon sun beats down, when the guards drink sake and the prisoners groan in the pit. It is the hour of the everyday, the hour of the world that goes on indifferently while men suffer and die. The silence of God, which had tormented Rodrigues throughout his captivity, is here given its final form: not a dramatic silence in the face of martyrdom, but the ordinary silence of a clock that marks the passage of time without meaning.

The Hour of the Monkey and the End of the Mission

The hour of the Monkey, as the time of Rodrigues' death, also marks the end of the Jesuit mission in Japan. The diary entry notes that Okada San'emon was sixty-four years of age, that he had been in the Christian Residence for thirty years, and that he had been under the charge of Inoue Chikugonokami. The mission that had begun with Francis Xavier in 1549, that had grown to hundreds of thousands of converts, that had built churches and seminaries, had been reduced to a single apostate priest dying at the hour of the Monkey in a guarded compound. The hour of the Monkey is thus the temporal marker of the mission's failure, the moment when the last priest in Japan, stripped of his name, his faith, and his priesthood, passed into the silence that had always surrounded him.