Magistrate's Office

The Magistrate's Office is the institutional heart of the Tokugawa Shogunate's campaign to eradicate Christianity in Japan. Under the direction of Inoue, the Lord of Chikugo, it functions as a court, a prison, and an engine of ideological warfare, wielding the full apparatus of state power to force apostasy from captured missionaries and Japanese Christians alike. Its methods—ranging from gentle persuasion to the pit torture—are calibrated to break the will, not merely the body, and its reach extends from the interrogation rooms of Nagasaki to the remote villages of Goto and Tomogi.

Structure and Authority

The Magistrate's Office operates through a hierarchy of officials, interpreters, and guards who carry out Inoue's designs. The interpreter who interrogates Sebastian Rodrigues after his capture boasts of having studied at the seminaries founded by the Portuguese in Arima, Amakusa, and Omura, yet he now uses that knowledge to attack the faith he once learned. The office maintains a network of informers and rewards betrayal: anyone who reports a priest receives three hundred pieces of silver, a brother two hundred, and a lay Christian one hundred. This system of incentives turns destitute peasants into potential informants, poisoning trust within villages and isolating the Christians from one another. The office also issues decrees such as the prohibition of fences between houses, so that neighbors can observe one another's behavior and report any suspicious activity.

Interrogation and Psychological Warfare

Inoue's approach to interrogation is deliberately patient and insidious. When Rodrigues is first brought before him, the magistrate does not threaten torture but instead engages in a seemingly casual conversation about Hirado, comparing Japan to a man burdened by the persistent affection of an ugly woman—an allegory for the unwanted advance of Christianity. He speaks of Christianity as a barren woman unfit to be a wife, and he tells Rodrigues that the missionaries do not know Japan. The interpreter, too, employs a strategy of taunting and theological debate, arguing that the Christian God created evil and that the missionaries' selfish dream has caused the blood of innocent peasants to flow. The office deliberately separates Rodrigues from the other Christians, provides him with three meals a day and straw mats, and allows him to pray and write letters—all to weaken his resistance before the inevitable torture. As Rodrigues himself realizes, the officials are like a spider watching its prey caught in the web, waiting for his spirit to weaken.

The Pit and the Fumie

The Magistrate's Office employs two signature instruments of coercion: the pit torture and the fumie test. The pit, or ana-tsurushi, involves hanging the victim upside down in a pit of filth, with a small incision behind the ear to allow blood to drip slowly, prolonging the agony for days. Christovao Ferreira, after six hours in the pit, gave the signal of apostasy. Inoue himself invented this torture, and the interpreter describes it with a gesture of dread, showing the scar behind Ferreira's ear. The fumie—a copper image of Christ or the Virgin that prisoners are ordered to trample—is used as a ritual of public renunciation. The office insists that trampling is merely a formality, that it does not hurt one's convictions, but the act is designed to create an irreversible breach between the believer and his faith. When the one-eyed Christian Chokichi refuses to trample, an official executes him on the spot with a single sword stroke, and his body is dragged to a hole the Christians themselves had dug.

The Final Confrontation and Rodrigues' Apostasy

The climax of the office's campaign against Rodrigues occurs on the night when he is brought to a dark cell in the magistrate's building. There he hears the groaning of Christians suspended in the pit—a sound he had mistaken for snoring. Ferreira, now called Sawano Chuan, is brought to the cell door and tells Rodrigues that he apostatized not because of the pit itself but because he could not bear the silence of God while the Christians suffered. He argues that Christ himself would have apostatized for love of them. The next morning, at dawn, the fumie is placed before Rodrigues. The interpreter urges him to go through with the formality, but Rodrigues sees the face of Christ on the worn copper plaque, and the image speaks to him: "Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world." He places his foot on the fumie, and the cock crows. The office has achieved its goal: Rodrigues, now called Okada San'emon, becomes the Apostate Paul, a collaborator who will spend the rest of his life in Japan, writing a disavowal of his religion and assisting the magistrate in identifying Christian objects.

Legacy and the Swamp of Japan

Inoue's final assessment of his victory is that Rodrigues was not defeated by him but by "this swamp of Japan." The Magistrate's Office, in this view, is merely the instrument of a deeper cultural force that absorbs and transforms foreign ideologies. The office's work does not end with Rodrigues' apostasy; it continues to monitor the Christian Residence in Edo, where the former priest lives under guard, and to conduct annual fumie ceremonies in which every household must trample on the sacred image. The office's records, preserved in the diary of a Dutch clerk and in the official documents of the Christian Residence, show that even decades later, the apparatus of surveillance and punishment remains in place, a permanent machinery for the suppression of a faith that, in Inoue's words, "cannot put down roots here."