Ferreira's apostasy

Ferreira's apostasy is the event that fractures the heroic narrative of the Christian mission in Japan and becomes the central enigma that drives the plot of Silence. Christovao Ferreira, the Portuguese Provincial of the Society of Jesus, a theologian of considerable ability and a missionary of thirty-three years' experience who had inspired priests and faithful alike, was captured and subjected to the torture of 'the pit' at Nagasaki. After six hours of agony suspended upside down in a pit of filth, with a small incision behind his ear to let blood drip slowly, he gave the signal of apostasy. His defection was the first of its kind among missionaries since the beginning of the mission, and it struck the Church in Rome as so unthinkable that many refused to believe the reports, suspecting them to be fictitious inventions of the Dutch or the Japanese.

The Historical Context and the Shock to the Church

The news of Ferreira's apostasy reached Rome at a time when the Church was already reeling from the intensifying persecution under the Tokugawa Shogunate. From 1587, the regent Hideyoshi had initiated a frightful persecution, and the Shogun Tokugawa had ordered the expulsion of all missionaries in 1614. Despite this, thirty-seven priests, including Ferreira, had remained in hiding. Ferreira himself had continued to send detailed reports to his superiors, including a letter from Nagasaki on March 22, 1632, describing the torture of five priests and two women at Unzen, where they were immersed in boiling water. The Church at Rome could not believe that this man, however terrible the torture, could be induced to renounce his faith. The shock was all the more profound because Ferreira was the acknowledged leader of the mission, and his collaboration with his former persecutors after his apostasy compounded the humiliation.

The Mechanism of the Torture and the Moment of Collapse

The pit torture, or ana-tsurushi, was a method perfected by the magistrate Inoue, the Lord of Chikugo. The victim was tightly bound, hung upside down from a gallows into a pit containing excreta and other filth, with the top of the pit level with the victim's knees. A small incision was made behind the ear to allow blood to vent, prolonging the agony. Some victims survived for more than a week, but the pain was described by a Dutch resident as 'wholly insufferable, no fire nor no torture equalling their languor and violence.' Ferreira endured this for six hours before he broke. Years later, when he confronted Rodrigues in the prison cell, Ferreira revealed the scar behind his ear and described the experience: 'For three days, I who stand before you was hung in a pit of foul excrement, but I did not say a single word that betray my God.' The reason he finally apostatized, he claimed, was not the physical pain itself but the sound of the groaning of other Christians hanging in the pit, for whom God did nothing.

The Aftermath and Ferreira's New Life

After his apostasy, Ferreira was given a Japanese name, Sawano Chuan, and was compelled to live in a mansion in Nagasaki, taking a Japanese wife and the children of an executed man. He was set to work translating a book on astronomy and, more painfully, writing a refutation of Christianity titled Gengiroku. He became a tool of the magistrate's office, used to identify Christian objects and to persuade other captured priests to apostatize. When Rodrigues was brought before him at the temple Saishoji, Ferreira, clad in a black kimono with his beard shaved off, argued that Japan was a 'swamp' where Christianity could not take root, that the Japanese had twisted the Christian God into something of their own, and that the sapling of Christianity had decayed at its roots. He told Rodrigues that 'Christ would certainly have apostatised for them,' a claim that became the final argument that led Rodrigues to place his foot on the fumie.

The Legacy and the Mystery of His Final Years

Ferreira's subsequent life and death remain shrouded in mystery. His grave can still be seen in a temple in Nagasaki, but the record of his burial was burnt in the atomic holocaust of 1945. Chinese sailors at Macao testified that prior to his death he had revoked his apostasy, dying a martyr's death in the same pit that had previously conquered him. The Dutch residents in Japan, however, said nothing of this, and his death, like much of his life, remains an enigma. In the novel's final appendix, the diary of an officer at the Christian Residence in Edo records that Okada San'emon, the Japanese name taken by Rodrigues, lived for thirty years under guard, and that Ferreira, referred to as 'Chuan,' continued to write and to serve the magistrate. The two apostate priests, Ferreira and Rodrigues, became known in Nagasaki as the Apostate Peter and the Apostate Paul, two inseparable twins bound by their shared fall and their shared solitude.