Kobinatacho

Kobinatacho is a district in Edo where the apostate priest Sebastian Rodrigues is sent to live after his formal renunciation of Christianity, a relocation that seals his transformation from a Portuguese missionary into a Japanese subject named Okada San'emon. The house prepared for him in Kobinatacho had previously belonged to Inoue, the Lord of Chikugo, the very magistrate who orchestrated his apostasy. This arrangement, proposed by Inoue himself during a meeting at the magistrate's office in Nagasaki, represents the final stage of Rodrigues' defeat: not death, but a life of quiet captivity within the society he came to convert.

Inoue's Offer and the House in Kobinatacho

In a meeting that took place on January 4th, Inoue informed Rodrigues that he would be sent to Edo in a month's time and that a house in Kobinatacho, the place where Inoue himself used to live, had been prepared for him. The magistrate also instructed Rodrigues to take the Japanese name of a deceased man named Okada San'emon and to take the man's wife as his own. Rodrigues, with a feeling of exhausted resignation, nodded in agreement. The house in Kobinatacho thus became the physical location where Rodrigues would live out the remainder of his life under the name Okada San'emon, a celibate priest now given a wife, a foreign missionary now a Japanese householder.

Life in the Christian Residence

The house in Kobinatacho was part of what the Japanese authorities called the Christian Residence, an enclosed building where apostate priests were kept under supervision. Official records from the Twelfth Year of Kanbun note that Okada San'emon was granted the ration of ten persons, indicating the household included servants and guards. The residence was not a prison in the conventional sense but a place of confinement where Rodrigues could move about within limits, write, and receive visitors, though always under the watch of guards. The house itself became the setting for the final decades of his life, a space where he continued to grapple with his faith in private while outwardly conforming to Japanese customs.

The Final Years and Death

Rodrigues lived in the Kobinatacho residence for approximately thirty years, from the Year of the Ram until his death in the Year of the Cock at the age of sixty-four. During this period, he was occasionally summoned to write disavowals of his religion at the command of the authorities, including a book-length refutation of Christianity. The official records of the Christian Residence document his death from illness on July 25th of the Ninth Year of Enpo, at a little past half past four in the afternoon. His body was cremated at Muryoin Temple in Koishikawa, and he received the posthumous Buddhist name Myusen Joshin Shinshi. The house in Kobinatacho, which had been his home for three decades, was thus the site of his long, quiet decline and death, far from the martyrdom he had once envisioned.

Thematic Significance

Kobinatacho represents the physical embodiment of the "swamp of Japan" that Inoue and Ferreira both described as the force that defeated Christianity. The house that was once Inoue's own becomes Rodrigues' cage, a place where the missionary who came to save Japan is instead absorbed into its social fabric, given a Japanese name, a Japanese wife, and a Japanese death. The district's name, Kobinatacho, marks the geographical endpoint of Rodrigues' journey from Lisbon to Goa to Macao to the mountains of Tomogi, and finally to a quiet house in Edo where he lived and died as a Japanese man, his faith hidden and transformed, his priestly identity erased by the very society he had sought to convert.