pit torture

The pit torture, known in Japanese as ana-tsurushi, stands as the central instrument of psychological and physical coercion in Shusaku Endo's Silence, a method devised by the magistrate Inoue that proved more devastating to the Christian mission than any previous form of persecution. It was the torture that broke Christovao Ferreira, the once-revered provincial of the Society of Jesus, and later Sebastian Rodrigues, forcing each to trample on the fumie and renounce their faith. Unlike the dramatic public martyrdoms by fire or boiling water that had previously strengthened Christian resolve, the pit torture operated in darkness and silence, turning the victim's own body into an engine of prolonged agony while using the suffering of others as a lever against the priest's conscience.

Description and Mechanism

The pit torture was a meticulously designed ordeal. The victim was tightly bound around the body as high as the chest, with one hand left free to give the signal of recantation, and then hung upside down from a gallows into a pit that usually contained excreta and other filth, the top of the pit being level with the victim's knees. To allow blood to vent and prolong consciousness, the forehead was lightly slashed with a knife. Some of the stronger martyrs lived for more than a week in this position, though the majority did not survive more than a day or two. A Dutch resident in Japan declared that those who had hung for two or three days assured him "the pains they endured were wholly insufferable, no fire nor no torture equalling their languor and violence." Yet one young woman endured this for fourteen days before she expired. The small incision made behind the ears allowed blood to drip slowly through the nose and mouth, a detail Ferreira later described from his own experience, and the groaning of those suspended in the pit produced a sound that Rodrigues initially mistook for the snoring of a drunken guard.

Historical Context and Purpose

The pit torture emerged as a deliberate refinement of persecution policy after the Tokugawa Bakufu realized that public executions were creating martyrs and strengthening Christian faith. The 1614 Edict of Expulsion had declared that the Kirishitan band sought "to overthrow true doctrine, so that they may change the government of the country, and obtain possession of the land," framing Christianity as a political threat. Under the neurotic third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, the hunt for Christians became systematically ruthless. The magistrate Inoue, himself a former Christian who had received baptism, understood that the goal was not simply to kill but to make the victims apostatize, thereby destroying the faith from within. The pit torture was his most effective invention for this purpose, as it combined unbearable physical suffering with the psychological pressure of knowing that one's apostasy could save others from the same fate.

Ferreira's Apostasy

Christovao Ferreira, the Portuguese Provincial who had spent thirty-three years in Japan and had been a source of inspiration to priests and faithful alike, became the first missionary to apostatize after six hours of agony in the pit. His defection was a cruel shock to the Church, all the more so when it became known that he was collaborating with his former persecutors, taking the Japanese name Sawano Chuan and writing a book called Gengiroku to refute Christian teaching. When Rodrigues later met Ferreira at the temple Saishoji, Ferreira showed him the brown scar behind his ear, the mark of the pit, and explained that he had not apostatized because of the physical torture itself. Rather, he had been placed in a cell where he could hear the groaning of five Christians suspended in the pit, and the official told him: "If you apostatise, those people will immediately be taken out of the pit, their bonds will be loosed, and we will put medicine on their wounds." When Ferreira asked why these people did not apostatize, the official laughed and answered: "They have already apostatised many times. But as long as you don't apostatise these peasants cannot be saved." Ferreira prayed, but prayer did nothing to alleviate their suffering, and he concluded that "Christ would certainly have apostatised for them."

Rodrigues' Ordeal

Rodrigues' encounter with the pit torture followed a similar pattern of psychological attrition. After his capture, he was treated with unexpected leniency, receiving three meals a day and straw mats for bedding, a strategy he gradually realized was designed to weaken his physical and spiritual resistance. The guards' good-natured ignorance of the scheme only made it more insidious. When he was finally brought to the magistrate's office, he was placed in a dark cell where the floor was covered with urine, and there he heard what he first thought was snoring. Ferreira, brought to the door, told him the truth: "That's not snoring. That is the moaning of Christians hanging in the pit." Three Christians were suspended in the courtyard, their blood dripping through incisions behind their ears. Ferreira, speaking through the darkness, told Rodrigues that he too had been imprisoned in that same cell and had engraved the words "Laudate Eum" on the wall. The old man's final argument was devastating: "I did not apostasise because I was suspended in the pit. 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 I apostasised... I was put in here and heard the voices of those people for whom God did nothing. God did not do a single thing. I prayed with all my strength but God did nothing." Rodrigues, unable to bear the groaning and Ferreira's relentless logic, finally placed his foot on the fumie as dawn broke and the cock crowed.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The pit torture functions in Silence as the ultimate test of faith and the mechanism through which the novel's central theological crisis is enacted. It is the physical manifestation of the silence of God, the void that seems to answer the prayers of the suffering with nothing but more suffering. The torture's effectiveness lies not in its physical pain alone but in its power to force the victim to confront the consequences of their faith for others. The interpreter's words to Rodrigues on the island—"If you don't apostatise, the peasants will be suspended in the pit"—reveal the trap: the priest's fidelity becomes the cause of others' agony. The pit torture thus embodies the novel's exploration of whether true love requires apostasy, whether Christ himself would have trampled on the fumie to save the suffering. The reward system that accompanied the persecution—three hundred pieces of silver for informing on a priest, two hundred for a brother, one hundred for a Christian—created a network of temptation that complemented the physical terror of the pit, turning the entire society into a mechanism of surveillance and betrayal. In the end, the pit torture, more than any other method, succeeded in breaking the mission, not by killing its leaders but by making them complicit in their own destruction, transforming Ferreira and Rodrigues into the Apostate Peter and the Apostate Paul of the Japanese Church.