Hitotsubashi Matabe

Hitotsubashi Matabe appears in the official records appended to Silence as a guard at the Christian Residence in Edo, the enclosed compound where the apostate priest Sebastian Rodrigues, now known by the Japanese name Okada San'emon, is kept under surveillance. Matabe's role in the narrative is defined entirely by his relationship with Kichijiro, the weak and repeatedly apostatizing Christian who has followed Rodrigues to Edo and serves as his attendant. The records of the Fourth Year of Enpo (1676) note that Matabe had been "on familiar terms with Kichijiro," and this friendship immediately casts suspicion on his own faith. When Kichijiro is searched and found to possess an amulet-case containing a Christian image with St. Paul, St. Peter, Xavier, and an angel, the authorities move to investigate everyone connected to him. Matabe is imprisoned alongside Kichijiro, his loyalty to the state now in doubt solely because of his association with a known crypto-Christian.

Imprisonment and Torture

Matabe's fate is recorded with the cold precision of bureaucratic documentation. On the same day that Kichijiro is cross-examined about the image, Matabe is "hung within the gaol" — a punishment that likely refers to the pit torture (ana-tsurushi) that the novel has already established as the most effective means of inducing apostasy. The entry specifies that "from this time on Matabe was tortured several times," indicating a sustained campaign of physical coercion designed to break his will or extract a confession. The following month, on October 18th, the Lord of the Residence comes personally to the Mountain Villa, and Matabe and his wife are tortured on the "wooden horse," a device that forces the victim to straddle a sharp-edged beam, often with weights attached to the ankles. The inclusion of his wife in the torture underscores the Tokugawa regime's policy of collective punishment: a family could be held responsible for the faith of one member. The records do not record Matabe's eventual fate — whether he apostatized, died under torture, or was released — but the silence itself is telling. In the world of Silence, those who endured without yielding were martyred; those who yielded were either released or, like Kichijiro, kept in a state of perpetual suspicion.

Thematic Significance

Matabe's story, though confined to a few lines in an appendix, serves as a grim coda to the novel's central meditation on the "swamp of Japan" — the idea, articulated by the apostate Ferreira and the magistrate Inoue, that Christianity cannot take root in Japanese soil because the culture twists and absorbs foreign doctrines until they become unrecognizable. Matabe is not a missionary or a theologian; he is a low-ranking guard whose only crime is friendship with a known Christian. His torture and imprisonment illustrate the thoroughness of the Tokugawa surveillance state, where even casual association could trigger investigation, and where the reward system — three hundred pieces of silver for informing on a priest, one hundred for a lay Christian — turned neighbor against neighbor. The fact that Matabe's wife is also tortured on the wooden horse demonstrates that the persecution was not directed solely at priests or prominent converts but reached into every household. In this sense, Matabe represents the countless anonymous victims of the persecution whose names survive only in official ledgers, their suffering recorded without commentary, their faith or lack of it left ambiguous. His presence in the novel's documentary appendix reinforces the historical verisimilitude of Endo's fiction, reminding the reader that the drama of Rodrigues and Ferreira unfolded within a real system of terror that crushed ordinary lives as surely as it broke the great missionaries.