1637

The year 1637 stands as a decisive turning point in the narrative of Silence, the moment when the long-debated plan to infiltrate Japan finally crystallizes into action. For the three young Portuguese priests—Sebastian Rodrigues, Francisco Garrpe, and Juan de Santa Marta—this was the year their Superiors, overcome by their ardent importunity, consented to the perilous mission. The decision came after months of resistance from Church authorities, who were reluctant to send more priests into a country where persecution had become systematic and where the Shimabara Rebellion had recently led to the slaughter of thirty-five thousand Christians and the complete severance of trade with Portugal. The three priests, former students of Christovao Ferreira at the monastery of Campolide, could not believe that their admired teacher had grovelled before the infidel after six hours in the pit. Their mission was twofold: to investigate the truth about Ferreira and to carry on an underground apostolate for the abandoned flock. The year 1637 thus set in motion the chain of events that would lead Rodrigues and Garrpe to Macao, then to the shores of Tomogi, and ultimately to the spiritual crisis that defines the novel.

The Decision and Its Context

The year 1637 was not merely a date on a calendar but the culmination of a long and agonizing process within the Church. In 1635, four priests had gathered around Father Rubino in Rome with a similar plan, but their Superiors had been slow to consent. The three Portuguese priests—Rodrigues, Garrpe, and Santa Marta—had been Ferreira's students and felt a personal stake in the matter. They could not accept that the man who had taught them theology, whose face they remembered with its clear blue eyes and soft radiant light, had turned his back on God. The Church in Europe viewed Ferreira's apostasy not simply as the failure of one individual but as a humiliating defeat for the faith itself and for the whole of Europe. The year 1637, therefore, carried the weight of this collective shame and the desperate hope that the truth might be redeemed. The priests' Superiors, though initially reluctant, were finally moved by the young men's ardent importunity, and the dangerous mission to Japan was approved.

The Journey and Its Symbolism

The year 1637 also marks the beginning of the physical journey that would test the priests' faith and endurance. On March 25, 1638, the Indian fleet sailed from the River Tagus, but the preparations and the decision had been made in the preceding year. The three priests strove to learn all they could about conditions in Japan, studying reports from missionaries like Luis Frois that described the new Shogun Iemitsu's even more cruel repression. They knew that the end of their arduous journey might bring them up against a fate more terrible than any suffering they had endured on the way. The year 1637 thus represents the threshold between the safety of Europe and the unknown dangers of Japan, a threshold that would lead Rodrigues to confront the silence of God and the swamp of Japan that Ferreira would later describe as a place where the sapling of Christianity withers and dies.

The Swamp of Japan

The year 1637 is also the year that the novel's central metaphor—the swamp of Japan—begins to take on its full meaning. The translator's preface notes that the novel's interest in Japan was less historical than contemporary, and that the two foreign apostates were taken as symbols of a Christianity that had failed because it was stubbornly Western. The year 1637, when the priests set out, is the year when the conflict between East and West, between the Hellenistic Christianity of Europe and the Japanese sensibility, becomes most acute. The swamp of Japan, as Inoue later tells Rodrigues, is a place where the roots of Christianity rot and the leaves wither. The year 1637 is the year when the priests, carrying their European faith, first step into this swamp, unaware that the very soil they hope to cultivate will transform their God into something unrecognizable. The year 1637 thus marks the beginning of a process that will lead Rodrigues to trample on the fumie and to hear the voice of Christ saying, "Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world."