1633

The year 1633 stands as a watershed in the narrative of Silence, the moment when the underground mission in Japan suffered an irreparable break and the silence of God began to press upon the consciousness of the priests with an almost physical weight. It is the year in which all news from Christovao Ferreira, the provincial of the Society of Jesus in Japan, came to an abrupt and drastic end, cutting the cord of communication between him and Alessandro Valignano in Macao. From this point forward, the fate of the most respected missionary in the country became a mystery, and the question of whether he had apostatised or died a martyr began to haunt those who had known him. For Sebastian Rodrigues, 1633 is not merely a date on a calendar; it is the year that inaugurated a prolonged period of divine silence that would eventually drive him to the edge of despair.

The Rupture of Communication

Until 1633, Ferreira had maintained a regular correspondence with Valignano, sending detailed reports on the conditions of the persecution and the fate of captured Christians. His letters, written from Nagasaki, were filled with a spirit of indomitable courage and provided the Church in Rome with its most reliable intelligence about the situation in Japan. But in 1633, all of this stopped. Valignano, speaking to Rodrigues and Francisco Garrpe in Macao, described the break: "The reports he sent me regularly from the year 1633 have come to a sudden end." The Superior could not say whether Ferreira had died of illness, was lying in prison, had won a glorious martyrdom, or was still alive but unable to send word. Crucially, Valignano did not even utter a word about the rumours that Ferreira had succumbed beneath torture, because he was as loath as the young priests to attribute such fanciful charges to his old friend. The silence that descended after 1633 was not just a gap in information; it was a void that invited the most terrible speculation.

The Silence of God and the Suffering of the Christians

The year 1633 also marks the point after which the problem of God's silence becomes acute for Rodrigues. As he witnesses the martyrdom of the Japanese Christians—Mokichi and Ichizo bound to stakes in the sea, the one-eyed man executed in the courtyard, the woman Monica drowned in the bay—he is tormented by the feeling that God has remained silent while men raise their voices in anguish. The memory of the sea that killed them, surging on uncannily in silence, becomes inseparable from the memory of the year when the last reliable word from Ferreira was received. "Behind the depressing silence of this sea, the silence of God," Rodrigues writes, "the feeling that while men raise their voices in anguish God remains with folded arms, silent." The year 1633 thus becomes the temporal anchor for a theological crisis: the point at which the divine voice, which had once spoken through the letters of a great missionary, fell silent, and the only sounds that remained were the moaning of the tortured and the monotonous roar of the waves.

The Swamp of Japan

The year 1633 is also the year after which the metaphor of Japan as a "swamp" begins to take on its full, corrosive meaning. It is the year that Ferreira, according to the later testimony of Inoue, the Lord of Chikugo, began to understand that the Christianity he had planted could not take root in Japanese soil. Inoue himself, reflecting on the fate of the mission, tells Rodrigues that "the root is cut, the sapling withers and the leaves die," and that the God whom the peasants of Goto and Ikitsuki secretly serve has gradually changed so as to be no longer like the Christian God at all. The year 1633 is the moment when the sapling of Christianity, which had once flourished with 400,000 believers, began to decay at its roots in the swamp of Japan. It is the year when the butterfly of Christian faith, caught in the spider's web of Japanese culture, began to lose its blood and flesh, leaving only the external skeleton of its form.

The Legacy of the Year

For Rodrigues, the year 1633 is not just a historical marker; it is a personal wound. It is the year that Ferreira, his beloved teacher, disappeared from the record, and the year that the silence of God began to erode his own faith. When he finally meets Ferreira in the temple of Saishoji, the old man tells him that the Japanese have never had the concept of God and never will, and that the mission has lost its meaning. "For twenty years I laboured in the mission," Ferreira says, "and the one thing I know is that our religion does not take root in this country." The year 1633 is the pivot on which this twenty-year labour turned from hope to despair. It is the year when the silence of God became a theological fact, and the swamp of Japan became an inescapable reality. For the rest of his life, Rodrigues will carry the weight of that year, knowing that the silence that began in 1633 never truly ended, and that the God who was silent then remained silent through his own apostasy and through the long years of his exile in Edo.