Christian secret organization

The Christian secret organization was the underground structure through which Japanese peasants kept their faith alive after the expulsion of missionaries and the execution of priests. Without ordained clergy, the community of Tomogi devised a lay hierarchy to administer sacraments, teach doctrine, and maintain the calendar of feasts, all while hiding from the Tokugawa authorities. This organization was not merely a stopgap but a profound adaptation of Christianity to the conditions of persecution, and it became the model that Sebastian Rodrigues himself taught to other villages.

Structure and Leadership

The organization was built on three tiers of lay leadership. At the top was the Jiisama, an older man of blameless life who held the highest authority and was entrusted with baptizing children. Below him were the Tossama, whose job was to instruct the faithful in prayer and catechism and to lead them in worship. The Tossama also created a calendar of all the Church's feasts—Christmas, Good Friday, Easter—and taught the faithful accordingly. The lowest tier were the Mideshi, helpers who assisted the Tossama. All were engaged in a life-and-death struggle to keep the faith alive. Rodrigues learned of this structure from Mokichi, who explained that in Tomogi the organization had been set up because for six years the village had had no priest or brother; the last Japanese priest, Miguel Matsuda, and the Jesuit brother Mateo de Coros had died in 1633.

Worship and Secrecy

Without priests, the Christians could not have Mass, but they secretly set up a holy picture in one of the houses and recited prayers in Latin—the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, and others—in front of it. In the intervals between prayers they chatted about everyday matters, so that if officials burst in they could claim they were simply having a meeting. The organization proved its worth when the guards came to search Tomogi: the Tossama got everyone to hide holy pictures, crucifixes, and any suspicious objects, and the Jiisama answered questions with a nonchalant face. The wisdom of peasants showed itself in their ability to pretend to be fools.

Rodrigues' Role and the Spread of the Model

When Rodrigues visited the Goto Islands, he found that the Christians there were equally eager for a priest and had been waiting for years. He taught them how to form the same organization—how to choose their Jiisama and Tossama—and they took to it with great enthusiasm, wrangling among themselves like people at election time. Kichijiro, the weak-willed apostate, kept stubbornly putting himself forward for any post of honor. The organization was thus not a fixed institution but a portable structure that could be replicated wherever Christians gathered in secret.

The Swamp and the Transformation of Faith

The novel's larger argument, voiced by the apostate Ferreira and the magistrate Inoue, is that the Japanese swamp transforms whatever is planted in it. Ferreira claimed that the Japanese had twisted the Christian God into something of their own, like a butterfly caught in a spider's web that retains only the external form. Inoue declared that the roots had been cut and that the God the peasants secretly served had gradually changed so as to be no longer like the Christian God at all. The secret organization, while preserving the externals of the faith, was itself part of this transformation—a lay structure that kept Christianity alive but also adapted it to a culture that had never possessed the concept of a transcendent God divorced from human experience. The organization was both a testament to the peasants' devotion and a sign of the swamp's power to reshape what it absorbs.