Goto

Goto is an island group off the coast of Kyushu, Japan, that serves as a crucial setting for Sebastian Rodrigues's early missionary work after his secret arrival in the country. It is here that he first encounters the fervent, long-suppressed faith of Japanese Christians who have been without a priest for years, and it is also here that the seeds of his eventual downfall are sown through the actions of the apostate Kichijiro. The islands represent both the promise of a hidden church and the inescapable reach of the Tokugawa persecution, embodying the complex and often contradictory nature of the Christian experience in Japan's 'swamp'.

Geography and Setting

The Goto Islands are a remote archipelago located west of Nagasaki, accessible only by a two-day journey across the sea. When the two peasants from Fukazawa first reach Rodrigues's hiding place on the mountain near Tomogi, they are described as being faint and ready to collapse with exhaustion, having made their way from the Goto Islands twenty leagues away. The journey itself is perilous, undertaken in a moonless night on a small ship, with the black sea stretching out everywhere and the sky holding not a single star. The islands themselves are characterized by a rugged, impoverished landscape, where the crumbling farm house that Rodrigues uses for a chapel is jammed tight with the bodies of peasants who come to him, thirsty and longing for refreshment like an army marching through a parched desert arriving at an oasis of water.

Rodrigues's Mission and the Christians of Goto

Rodrigues's mission to Goto is initiated by the two peasants who had traveled from the islands to find him, one with blood-stained feet from climbing the mountain. Upon arriving, he is completely overwhelmed with work, baptizing children and hearing the confessions of adults, who come to him one after another, completely ignoring the ban on Christianity. The Christians of Goto, like those in Tomogi, are poor farmers and fishermen who eke out a miserable existence, and they find in Christianity a path in which they can cast away the fetters that bind them, a stark contrast to the Buddhist bonzes who simply treat them like cattle. Rodrigues baptizes thirty adults and children in a single day, and hears more than fifty confessions, noting that the peasants stare at him with eyes alive with curiosity. He also instructs them on how to form the secret organization of Jiisama and Tossama, which the people of Tomogi had devised when completely deprived of priests, a method they take to with great enthusiasm, wrangling with one another like the people of Lisbon at election time.

Kichijiro's Role and Betrayal

Kichijiro, the weak-willed apostate who had betrayed his own family, plays a pivotal and duplicitous role in Goto. It is he who first tells the peasants from Fukazawa about Rodrigues's presence, leading them to seek him out. Upon Rodrigues's arrival in Goto, Kichijiro is no longer the same cringing man; he becomes the hero of the village, extolled to the skies, and walks around with his head in the air, having apparently exaggerated to the Christians the whole story of Macao and the sea journey, making out that the arrival of the two priests in Japan is all his work. Despite Rodrigues's disgust at his glib talk, he cannot deny that he is greatly in his debt. However, Kichijiro's past as an apostate is not forgotten by the villagers of Tomogi, who later suspect that the whole catastrophe of the persecution has occurred just because of him. It is in Goto that Kichijiro's fundamental weakness is most starkly contrasted with the strength of the other Christians, and it is from here that he will eventually lead the guards to Rodrigues, betraying him for three hundred pieces of silver.

The Swamp of Japan and the Transformation of Faith

The Goto Islands also serve as a microcosm for the central thesis of the novel: that Japan is a 'swamp' that fundamentally alters whatever is planted in it. The interpreter who debates Rodrigues on the island argues that Christian doctrine is something the Japanese do not want, and that the missionaries are forcing a foreign religion on a country that has its own. This idea is later echoed by the apostate Ferreira, who claims that the Japanese have never had the concept of God and never will, and that the God the Japanese believe in is a distortion, like a butterfly caught in a spider's web, with only the external form remaining. The magistrate Inoue himself states that the Christianity brought to Japan has changed its form and become a strange thing, 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 islands thus become a place where the 'root is cut' and the 'sapling withers,' a testament to the novel's exploration of cultural and religious transformation.