For These the Least of My Brethren: The Concern of Endô Shûsaku

For These the Least of My Brethren: The Concern of Endô ShûsakuAuthor(s): Michael GallagherSource: The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Apr., 1993),pp. 75-84Published by: American Association of Teachers of JapaneseStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/489127 .

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Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese

FOR THESE THE LEAST OF MY BRETHREN: THE CONCERN OF ENDO SHUSAKU

Michael Gallagher

About thirty years ago, it was very popular in American Catholic literary circles, such as they were, to argue about what constituted a Catholic writer. In more enlightened times, this sort of thing has become passe. But now, the emergence of End6 Shuisaku on the stage of world literature gives me cause enough to bring it up once more.

To borrow a phrase from the old Latin Mass, "Dignun et justum est"-it is right and just-right and just that John Carroll as a Catholic school should honor End6 Shfisaku with an honorary degree. In John Carroll's more than a century of existence, we have never given an honorary degree to a writer. The Catholic Church, like Plato, is wary of writers. You never know what a writer is going to come out with next, and those in authority don't like to be surprised.

The Church is especially wary of writers who seem to betray an interest in matters theological. The attitude of many of the hierarchy was well expressed by the Anglican bishop in Evelyn Waugh's first novel, Decline and Fall. When two laymen get into a heated discussion on the date of the introduction of the rood screen, the bishop mildly observes that it was his experience that any concern on the part of the laity for Church matters was usually a prelude to insanity.

It is also right and just that John Carroll as a Jesuit school should honor Mr. End6. For, whatever his mental state may be, Mr. End6 is not only interested in religion, but he has a special affinity-maybe to the point of obsession-for a period of Japanese history that is almost unknown in the West, a period that, despite its obscurity, has a deep significance to the Catholic Church and to the Society of Jesus in par- ticular. The pages of the Jesuit martyrology are filled with the names of priests, brothers, and seminarians-Japanese, Portuguese, and Italian-who died in the most horrible ways imaginable during the great persecution that began at the end of the 16th century and didn't end until 1869.

It was one of the most thorough and systematic persecutions that the Church has ever suffered. One of its most infamous artifacts was the dreaded fumie-literally "step-on picture"-a metal plaque with

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a bas-relief image of Christ or the Virgin that suspected Christians had to step on either to prove their innocence or to deny their faith. And one of its most infamous tortures was anazuri, in which the victim was hung upside down, with his or her head-there were women martyrs as well as men-thrust down into a pit that had been filled with excrement and other foul-smelling material. The forehead was lightly slashed to prevent the blood from congesting, though after a while blood flowed from the mouth, the ears, and even the eyes.

The martyrs include Camillo Costanzo, burnt to death in 1622 on an island off the coast from Nagasaki, whom End6 mentions in his short

story "Mothers" (Haha naru mono), and the remarkable Japanese Jesuit Pedro Kasui Kibe, the hero of Endo's untranslated novel Guns and the Cross (Ju to jUjika). At Edo in 1629, Kibe steadfastly endured anazuri. Two elderly priests tortured with him recanted the second day, but Kibe not only persisted in his refusal to do so but kept encouraging the Christians who were forced to witness his agony, and the Shogunate officials finally ordered him to be burnt to death.

We are not honoring Mr. Endo, however, simply because Jesuits fig- ure quite prominently in his novels. We are honoring him because his novels challenge us as Christians and challenge John Carroll as a Jesuit school. Mr. Endo's novels do not edify. They do not give you a warm

pious glow. There once was a writer who wrote popular novels based on the

lives of the saints. His novels were edifying, so edifying that the Vati- can made him a Knight of the Holy Sepulcher-an honor not likely to be accorded to Endo, as it wasn't to Waugh, Greene, Bernanos, or Mauriac. Churchmen don't like unpleasant or incongruous details. For most churchmen a single wart, like a single mortal sin, is enough to war- rant condemnation, and Mr. End6 is a portrait artist who lays on the warts with a lavish hand.

I once had a job working for the Church in which I was supposed to pass moral and critical judgment on movies for the guidance of the pious faithful. Whenever there was a film that presented problems, I had to confer with two or three other people. One of them was our titular head, a genial Jesuit who liked to travel all over the world to film con- ferences but actually didn't like movies much and seldom went to one. This worthy man would grow restive whenever I started to give details. "Never mind all that," he'd say. "What's the moral of the story?"

Think of it! The moral of the story. What's the moral of Hamlet? He who hesitates is lost. What's the moral of King Lear? There's no fool like an old fool. Romeo and Juliet? The course of true love never did run smooth. Shakespeare even supplies you with it.

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The moral seekers don't want to be bothered with details. They want answers. They want everything perfectly clear.

Behind this demand for the meaning, the moral, to exclusion of all else, lies a distrust of literature and a desire to domesticate it. For, once broken, once made subservient, literature can be used to further worthy ends.

Francois Mauriac, as loyal and conservative a Catholic as can be

imagined, once gave voice to a certain sad frustration. As a writer he was obliged to look deeply into the most secret recesses of the human heart, the very wellsprings of evil, and write accordingly. For years, he said, he had been looking for a pious priest with whom he could dis- cuss this, but he never found one. Greene went further than Mauriac. In one of his critical essays, he made the disconcerting assertion that a writer has a "duty to be disloyal."

Mr. End6 seems to have fulfilled the duty admirably. Some of his critics contend that he has indeed gone above and beyond the call of

duty. He has not only been charged by some of his Japanese fellow Catholics with disedificaton-by some Japanese Protestants too, to make it an ecumenical condemnation-but, worse yet, with dishonoring the memory of the Japanese martyrs, calling into question the validity of Japanese Catholicism, and coming up with the seemingly blasphe- mous assertion that Jesus would have stepped on a fumie to save others from suffering.

Let me briefly review Mr. End6's alleged sins. Not all of them of course-just the ones he's been willing to have published.

Twenty three years ago Mr. End6's novel Silence imposed itself upon the tranquil and painfully respectable world of Japanese Catholi- cism like a tiger crashing a cat show. A historical event inspired Si- lence: the apostasy in the early 17th century of the Jesuit provincial Christopher Ferreira, who after a heroic life of some twenty years as hunted priest and an inspiration to the persecuted Church, finally fell into the hands of the Shogunate officials and broke under the torture of anazuri. After apostatizing Ferreira was forced to accept a Japanese wife, and thenceforth, so it seems, he cooperated with the Shogunate in the persecution of Christians.

End6's hero is fictional, a young Jesuit priest named Sebastian Rodrigues. Rodrigues comes to Japan flaming with zeal, intent on mak- ing up for the great scandal caused by Ferreira's fall. He too is captured, however, and eventually, he too apostatizes-not because of the fear of torture but because of the effect of a meeting with Ferreira, who had once been his theology professor at the University of Coimbra.

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Ferreira tells him that the Japanese can never be Christians, that Japan is like a vast swamp that freely draws in whatever comes its way but changes it intrinsically in the process of absorbing it.

When the young priest counters by saying that he has seen peasants endure horrible torture and die heroic deaths for the Faith, Ferreira shakes his head sadly and tells him:

They died not for the faith we know-which they never

really understood-but for something of their own creation. We had no right to come here with our strange creed and disturb their lives and cause them such terrible suffering. If Jesus himself were here, he would step on the fumie willingly to spare them further suffering. This is what Rodrigues himself finally does. Like Ferreira, then,

he too seems to admit defeat-vanquished by the swamp that is Japan. A later novel Samurai ends on the same note of apparent defeat and

oblivion. The Spanish Franciscan Velasco had once hoped to become the first bishop of Japan by accompanying an extraordinary trade mission sent by the daimyo of Sendai to Europe by way of Mexico-again, an actual historical event. The mission fails, and he is burnt to death on a beach with a Portuguese Jesuit. Afterwards, soldiers gather up their mingled bones and ashes in a rush mat and throw the mat into the water. The novel ends with these lines:

The frothy waves which swept onto the beach swallowed up the rush mat, collided, and retreated. Those movements were repeated several times, and then the winter sun beat down upon the long beach as though nothing had happened, and the ocean stretched out beneath the sound of the wind. As though nothing has happened. All that passion, love, yearning,

sacrifice, and suffering come to nothing. It is a denouement that's not very edifying, to be sure. Quite the contrary, it's one that is scandalous and disturbing to the simple faithful-not to mention simple prelates.

Nor does it help matters much that Velasco dies joyfully. Just before he perished at the stake, he had gotten the news that Hasekura Rokuemon, the eponymous hero of Samurai, had died a martyr. Hase- kura, one of the vassals of the daimyo of Sendai, had converted to Christianity while a member of the mission. But things were less clear- cut than Velasco let himself believe. Hasekura had converted to Chris- tianity simply because he realized that his master wanted him to do so for the good of the mission. And once the daimyo of Sendai realized that the Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, was dead serious about cutting off relations with Spain and Portugal and intended to enforce his edict, a Christian retainer became an embarrassment. And so he simply had

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Hasekura executed as a gesture of fealty to his own master in Edo. Hasekura was a mere pawn with no voice in his fate.

But was Velasco altogether wrong? There is a crucial dialogue be- tween Hasekura and his servant Yozo before the samurai is led off to be executed. Yozo too became a Christian during the course of the mission. Unlike the other converts, however-the samurai who did it out of a sense of duty to their lord and the merchants who did it out of greed- Yozo became a Christian because he had come to believe. And what first drew him to the faith was the behavior of Velasco. Now Velasco was not a paragon of heroic Christian virtue. He wasn't especially fond of the Japanese. He loathed outright his brothers in Christ, the Jesuits. He had to struggle with the temptation to masturbate. He was in some ways a small-minded man, not immune to vanity. Velasco liked the idea of being a bishop though he told himself it was for the good of the Church. But Velasco, for all his faults, believed in Jesus, and, believ- ing, he tried to do what Jesus commanded us to do. Like Greene's famous Whisky Priest in The Power and the Glory, he was, as one French critic put it so well, "faithful to the essential."

So it was that Velasco nursed the merchants who fell sick during the interminable voyage across the Pacific. So it was that he shared his dry clothing and bedding with them when everything they had became soaked in a storm at sea. Hasekura too noticed this extraordinary behavior-all the more extraordinary to a samurai because merchants were a class held in low esteem by the Japanese and Hasekura also knew that Yozo's conversion was sincere.

Now, as Hasekura is about to die, Yozo whispers that Jesus, who was himself betrayed, who was himself condemned to death by an arrogant ruler, will be standing with him at the end. This Jesus is the outcast Jesus, the powerless Jesus with skinny arms, with blood and spittle on his face, the Jesus whose image Hasekura had seen in the huts of Mexican peasants, an image that had at first repelled him. But then when he saw the triumphant images of Jesus in the vast churches of Madrid and Rome, Hasekura began to recall the ugly Jesus with a certain affection.

Hasekura nods to Yozo. We don't know what he's thinking at this moment. Perhaps he's just trying to comfort his grieving servant. But he does nod.

Yozo is one of those unheroic figures who abound in Mr. Endo's fic- tion. Hasekura too, despite his samurai rank, is a quite ordinary man with quite ordinary hopes and fears. So, as we've seen, is Velasco himself. Other portraits, warts and all, in the Endo gallery include: the vacillating Rodrigues in Silence; Suguro, the young intern in The Sea and Poison, who is pressured into taking part in a deliberately lethal

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operation performed on a captured American airman; another Suguro, in the short story "A Forty-Year-Old Man" (Yonjussai no otoko), who sum- mons up courage enough to confesses his adultery to a myna bird, whose solemn black feathers remind him of a cassock; still another Suguro, in the short story "My Belongings" (Watakushi no mono), who is trapped in a dead-end marriage but can't break free because the sorrowful face of his wife reminds him of another sorrowful face, that of Jesus; still another Suguro, in Scandal, the eminent Catholic author heaped with honors, who is haunted by a loathsome doppelganger who he fears may be his true self; the cowardly German monk in the short story "Fuda-no- Tsuji," whom the students ridicule and nickname "Mouse" (Nezumi); the student Egi in the short story "Despicable Bastard" (Iya na yatsu), who hates himself because he is unable to hide his fear of contagion during a baseball game with a team of lepers; and, finally, the snivel- ing Kichijir6 in Silence, who betrays Rodrigues and then begs his forgiveness. And not just once.

I think that understanding such people is the key to understanding Mr. End6. Mr. End6 loves these people. He loves them extravagantly. It is they, I believe, who-as Lady Murasaki would say-have moved Mr. Endo to an emotion so passionate that he could no longer keep it shut up in his heart. It is they who have made him feel that there must never come a time when people do not know their story.

How congenial to such a passion is Christianity, which dares make the incredible assertion that the Word was made flesh and, by becom- ing flesh, sanctified every element of human life-no matter how ugly, how wretched, no matter how despicable-and made it worthy of celebration?

It is also for their sake, I think, that Mr. End6 incurs most of the charges laid against him. Does he dishonor the martyrs? Of course, he doesn't. Because of Mr. Endo a far greater number of Westerners know about the martyrs than would otherwise have been the case. He has focused world-wide attention on the martyrs and their heroism, but- and I can't emphasize this too strongly-his main concern as a writer lies elsewhere.

Mr. Endo's passionate concern is for those who lack the courage to die as martyrs. Those who stepped on the fumie and went through the form of recantation and then went back to their miserable hovels and begged Jesus' forgiveness. Those who prominently displayed a statue of Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy, but thought of her in their hearts as the Virgin Mary. We see this concern most clearly in his short story "Moth- ers," in which the kakure appear. The kakure-literally "the hid- den"-are secret Christians whom centuries of oppression and isolation

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have so alienated that, in modern times, they've refused the opportu- nity to reunite themselves with the Church.

Mr. EndB's short story "Unzen" is named after a modem hot springs resort on a site where Christians were once tortured hideously. A Catholic writer from Tokyo-nobody we know-visits the resort in the off season and learns of a certain Kichijiro, who lacked the courage to die a martyr, but, nonetheless, made no secret of his faith and hung about like a whipped dog, begging forgiveness. In Kichijir6-who would, of course, later take his place in Silence-the writer at last finds somebody who behaves as he was sure he would have behaved had he the misfortune to live in a time of persecution.

The Spanish say that God can write straight with crooked lines. One of the most glorious pages in the history of Christianity occurred one day in 1865 when a French priest was about to say Mass in Naga- saki for the foreign community. A group of Japanese, poor local fish- ermen, approached the priest and asked him three questions, the three questions that Jesuits had given to their ancestors two and a half centuries before to put to any ministers of the gospel who came to Japan: do you obey the Pope, do you honor the Virgin Mary, and are you married? It was indeed a glorious event, a testimony to centuries of faith. But if all their ancestors and they themselves had been heroic instead of ordinary, it would not have taken place. Christianity would have been wiped out.

What about the charge that the missionaries were wrong to bring their disturbing Gospel, to disrupt the lives of these poor peasants, to set events in motion that would cause hundreds and hundreds of them to die horrible deaths? Not to be facetious, but I feel rather sure that Mr. End6 himself does not believe this. Had the missionaries not come and stirred up so much trouble, Mr. End6 would never have been given one of his major themes.

Jesus said: "I come not to bring peace but a sword." Contrary to popular belief, Christianity does not prize harmony above all else. It's a terribly unbalanced religion. How could it be otherwise when its sym- bol is the cross?

In Flannery O'Connor's marvelous short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"-this is a funny story, mind you-an entire family-grandmother, father, mother, two children-is wiped out by a psychopath called the Misfit and his similarly maladjusted accomplices. (The two children are really obnoxious if that makes it any easier.)

When it comes down to just the grandmother still alive, she and the Misfit get into a discussion on Jesus. The Misfit brings him up. Did Jesus raise the dead or didn't he? The Misfit won't say one way or another because he wasn't there. But how he wishes he had been there, he says,

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because then he would know. And that would make all the difference in the world. What Jesus did, says the Misfit, "is throw everything off balance."

And so the Jesuit missionaries, preaching Jesus, threw the Japanese social structure off balance. They brought the Gospel, the good word. They brought a message of hope, of solace from suffering, of the ransom of captives, of triumph over death, of universal love, and, by their own way of living and dying, they gave eloquent testimony that they themselves believed what they preached.

Did the Japanese martyrs die for a distorted version of Christian- ity? Well, let's look around and see if we can find an undistorted version of Christianity.

Ferreira makes this charge. Ferreira was Portuguese. What had

Portugal done with Christianity? Think of the terrible Alfonso de

Albuquerque, who put the proper fear of God into the enemies of Portu-

gal and Christ by mixing in Muslim skulls with the cannon balls he fired into besieged cities. Catholic Spain? Think of Cortez and Pizzaro. Think, too, of the sailors of the God-fearing Columbus testing out the keenness of their swords on the flesh of Indians as well as raping and enslaving them. Think of Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York, letting photographers take pictures of him sitting behind a machine-gun in Vietnam and saying: "My country right or wrong." The most demonic distortion of Christianity is the marriage of cross and flag.

John Carroll University awarded Mr. Endo an honorary degree. Thirty-nine years ago, when I graduated from John Carroll in June of 1952, someone quite different from Mr. Endo received an honorary degree.

The honoree in 1952 was Curtis LeMay. General Curtis LeMay was an authentic American hero. It was LeMay who led the B-29s in the first low-level fire bomb raids against Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe. So it was that our honoree of thirty-nine years ago spent about two years doing his best to kill our honoree of 1991. There was nothing personal in it, of course.

Nothing personal, but in one such raid, the great Army Day raid of March 25, 1945, LeMay's men killed some 90,000 Japanese, and the next day the canals of Tokyo and the Arakawa and Sumida Rivers were clogged with corpses.

This kind of warfare, the direct killing of civilians, is totally contrary to the Just War theory, which has been much discussed of late. You simply cannot intend the death of civilians according to Catholic moral theology. Yet the only American Catholic voice raised against the deliberate slaughter of the civilian populations of Dresden, Tokyo,

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and Osaka was that of Dorothy Day in the pages of The Catholic Worker. The Catholic Worker, needless to say, didn't have a place among the reading material on Harry Truman's bedside table, and so, since there had not been a peep out of the mainline Christian churches about the fire bomb raids, there was nothing to give Harry, a good and decent man, pause when it came time to give the green light to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Nagasaki bomb fell directly on the Urakami section of the city, a place hallowed in the history of Christianity in Japan and a place that has a tenacious hold on Mr. End6's creative imagination. The bomb destroyed the cathedral and wiped out three congregations of nuns

I think maybe Mr. End6, a great writer, is also a better theologian than he himself realizes. In Silence he was ahead of his time. If we can believe the New Testament, Jesus himself shares Mr. Endo's special regard for the wretched and the outcast. His love in fact is even more extravagant and unreasonable. And this insight has now become one of the main themes of Liberation Theology, with its preferential option for the poor. And Liberation Theology has arisen in Latin America, where the image of Jesus is not the triumphant Christ the King but the wretched, suffering Jesus, whose face is covered with blood and spittle.

Mr. Endo, as we see in "Mothers" especially-the kakure pray before a crude picture of a bare-breasted peasant woman holding a child-wants to emphasize the motherly nature of God because fathers are fearsome figures in Japanese society. Western theology, under the influence of feminism, has come around to this same view.

It is not only the Japanese who need the image of a feminine God and of a Jesus who is a wretched outcast. The gravest threats to Ameri- can life today, and to the Christian faith, is the macho spirit, the arrogant celebration of power that has made violence endemic to our society.

Why did we give Mr. End6, the writer, an award? Because we owe him a great deal. Let us go back to Flannery O'Connor for a moment- the grandmother and the Misfit. The grandmother had begun by bab- bling frantically, desperate to stay alive. But if you talk about Jesus, it affects you. She notices a change in the Misfit's face. He doesn't look frightening anymore, but weak and helpless. She stretches out her hand to touch his face and says: "Why, you're like my own boy!" The Misfit jumps back and pulls the trigger of the shotgun pointed at her chest.

"She was sure a talker, wasn't she?" says one of his accomplices. And the Misfit replies: "Yes, she would of been a good woman if there had been somebody there to shoot her every day of her life."

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As it was with the grandmother, so it is with Holy Mother Church. And Mr. Endo is the Misfit.

I hope the dignity of an honorary degree does not spoil our Misfit.

May he keep his rhetorical shotgun loaded and leveled. Mother Church needs him very much-and so do we all.



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For These the Least of My Brethren: The Concern of Endô Shûsaku