Twenty Plates and a Borrowed Name: The Fumi-e, Giuseppe Chiara, and the Making of Silence, 1629–1685

The Box That Came at New Year

What Was the E-fumi Ceremony in Nagasaki?

In Nagasaki the officials arrived on the fourth day of the first month and finished on the ninth, which gave them six days to process a city.

They worked in threes. A ward officer, called yokome or otona, walked ahead with the register; two assistants followed carrying the plates in their frames. At each door the household roll was read out loud, name by name, and each person named stepped forward and put a bare foot on the image set into the wood. Then the next name. Then the next house. The register was marked, the officers moved on, and the street behind them was, administratively speaking, clean.

Nobody was asked what they believed. Nobody was asked anything at all. The ceremony was called e-fumi, picture-treading, and it was scheduled into the New Year observances the way an audit is scheduled into a fiscal quarter, because that is what it functionally was.

The object underfoot was the fumi-e, written 踏み絵, the treading picture.

The plaque is remembered as a moment of private drama, a knife-edge choice put to a trembling individual. It became that, occasionally, for a handful of captured priests. For the population of Nagasaki it was an annual municipal chore involving a queue, a clerk, and a piece of metal that several thousand people had already stepped on that week. A regime that stages a martyrdom creates a saint, and the shogunate had learned that lesson expensively during the persecutions of 1617 to 1640. A regime that files paperwork creates nothing at all, which was the entire idea.

Infants were not exempt. Mothers carried them forward and the officers rubbed the babies' bare feet across the bronze, entering them on the roll as compliant. Registered Buddhist monks were not exempt either, and the reason was procedure rather than spite: any category that could be waved past would instantly become a hiding place. The bureaucracy had thought about this more carefully than the missionaries ever gave it credit for.

Six days, one city, every soul on the register, every year, for close to two centuries.

Twenty Plates and a Founder's Name

How the Fumi-e Was Made: The Twenty Brass Plates of 1669

The idea is traced to Mayeda Gen-i, governor of Kyoto, who around 1597 suggested to Toyotomi Hideyoshi that the image of Christ be engraved on a copper plate and suspects be made to walk across it. He did other things in 1597, renewing the proscription in January and crucifying twenty-six Christians on Nishizaka hill at Nagasaki in February, but no nationwide apparatus followed. The plate was an idea in a memorandum, and it stayed there for thirty years.

It reappeared in Nagasaki in the late 1620s, and the sources cannot agree on whose hand put it back into use. Some records credit Mizuno Morinobu, magistrate of the city from 1626. Japanese accounts more often name Takenaka Uneme-no-kami and give the year 1629. Ecclesiastical logs describe the ceremony as already operating in 1627. The disagreement is unresolved, and it matters less than what it conceals, which is that the device changed jobs in those years. It began as a test administered to known captives, a way of forcing a man who had already announced his korobi, his fall, to demonstrate that he meant it. By the 1630s it had become a preventative screen run across an entire population that was not suspected of anything.

The object itself went through three generations, a small lesson in the engineering problems of mass administration. The earliest images were paper. Paper does not survive several thousand feet; the sheets wore through constantly, which was expensive and, worse, meant the sacred image was visibly being destroyed by the ceremony rather than by the participants. Next came wooden slabs, ye-ita, written 絵板, more durable and still not durable enough. The permanent solution arrived in 1669, when an engraver of Nagasaki whom the records name Yuasa, a reading other accounts render as Hagiwara Yūsa, was commissioned to cast and engrave twenty brass plates.

The metal came from confiscated Christian objects. Older accounts say it was stripped from the altars of Nagasaki's demolished churches, though those had come down more than half a century earlier and the likelier source is the accumulated stock of seized devotional bronzes and medals. Either way the accounting is the same. The confiscated faith was melted down and recast as the instrument for measuring its own absence.

The plates were small, roughly five inches by four, and each was mounted in the center of a heavy wooden board so that a foot landing anywhere near it landed on the image and not on the floor. The iconography was chosen for recognition rather than theological weight: Christ on the cross, the Virgin and Child, an Ecce Homo. Surviving examples are worn to near-blankness at the center, the faces gone entirely, the composition legible only around the margins where fewer feet had landed.

That erosion is a record of attendance. Read the other way, it is a record of how many people came, complied, went home, and did not stop.

The Loan of the Plates

Where the Fumi-e Was Used, and What Refusing It Cost

Twenty plates for a country of some thirty million people looks like an absurd ratio until the distribution model is understood, and the distribution model is the most quietly revealing thing about the system.

The plates lived in Nagasaki, under the magistrate's control. Neighboring daimyō who wished to screen their own vassals did not commission their own; they borrowed the city's, on schedule, and returned them. The shogunate had inadvertently invented a lending library of sacrilege, and the standard of proof was therefore uniform across western Japan because the instrument was literally the same object. The magistrate of Nagasaki, meanwhile, knew exactly which lord had borrowed what and when, which is the sort of information a central government finds useful about its provinces.

Coverage was heaviest in Kyūshū, where the Christian population had been densest, and patchy in the east, because there had never been much there to screen for.

The penalties were not written into a schedule so much as understood. Hesitation was the offense. A person who stopped, or looked at the plate too long, or set the foot down and then lifted it, had already produced the evidence, and arrest followed at once. What followed arrest was slow burning at the stake, crucifixion, frequently inverted, or transportation to Unzen, where the sulfur springs performed a function that required no executioner and no witnesses of the sort who write martyrologies. Liability did not stop at the person. Discovery implicated the household, the village headman, and the five-household group, the gonin-gumi, into which every family had been organized, so that each of the other four households had a direct, calculable, entirely secular interest in the religious conformity of its neighbors.

That was the mechanism. Not faith against unbelief. Neighbor against neighbor, with the state as the accountant.

And underneath it, the thing the accountants never captured. Believers who stepped on the plate went home and spent hours reciting the conchirisan, the act of contrition, and the orasho, the oral prayers whose Latin and Portuguese had already begun eroding into sounds nobody could parse, asking forgiveness for what they had done that morning in front of a clerk. The hidden communities of the Sotome coast, the Gotō islands and Ikitsuki built the annual trampling into their devotional year as a fixed penitential season, an obstacle to be passed and then atoned for, like a fast.

The system produced perfect compliance statistics. It did not produce a single conversion, and it was never designed to.

Bones and Flesh

What Japanese Converts Believed They Were Treading On

What, exactly, did a Japanese convert of the 1630s think he was putting his foot on?

The answer is stranger than either the Jesuits or the magistrates assumed, because the theological content that reached Japan had been through a translation process that occasionally broke in ways nobody noticed for years. The mission press had been printing Japanese devotional literature since 1590, under the difficulty that the target language had no vocabulary for a great deal of what was being said. Contemptus Mundi, the Japanese version of the Imitation of Christ, appeared in romanized form at Amakusa in 1596. In its Eucharistic passages the Latin corpus was rendered with the compound 骨肉, kotsuniku, bones and flesh, printed in the mission's own romanization as gocotnicuno Eucharistia.

This was a serious error, and the mission's own reference works document why. The Vocabvlario da Lingoa de Iapam, printed at Nagasaki in 1603, records the phrase cotnicuno nozomi and glosses it as the urges of the flesh; the word carried a heavy freight of lust and worldly appetite. In medical usage, kotsuniku denoted the inert material of a carcass. A Japanese reader meeting the phrase in a Eucharistic context was being told, with the full authority of the printed book, something between an obscenity and a description of butchery.

The 1610 Kyoto edition, issued as Kontemutsusu munji, expunged the word from those passages entirely. The conventional explanation is cultural accommodation, the mission softening a doctrine Japanese sensibilities found repellent. José Miguel Pinto dos Santos has argued that this reads a policy into what was simply a correction, executed through one of the most orthodox tools in the Jesuit box: the Principle of Economy, the instruction that the hardest mysteries be withheld until the hearer could carry them. The missionaries were not diluting the faith. They were fixing a typo that had been theologically catastrophic for fourteen years.

Which is the substrate on which the fumi-e landed. The Jesuits had brought a paternal architecture: law, sin, judgment, an external tribunal. Japanese Christianity gravitated instead toward mercy, and toward a maternal figure of unconditional forgiveness, most visibly in the Maria Kannon, the porcelain Guanyin figures hidden households kept on domestic altars and addressed as the Virgin.

For a believer inside that framework, stepping on the plate ended nothing. It was a physical act, performed under duress, by a body that a merciful mother-deity understood to be weak and would forgive without being asked twice. The magistrate saw a renunciation and wrote it down. The person doing it saw a Tuesday.

The Inquisitor Who Preferred the Living

Who Was Inoue Masashige, the Shogunate's Inquisitor General?

Inoue Chikugo-no-kami Masashige turned this from a set of local practices into a national system, and the practices took the shape they did because he had a theory.

He was born in 1585. He became a metsuke, an inspector, in 1625, received junior lower court rank and the title Chikugo-no-kami in 1628, and rose to ōmetsuke, inspector general, in 1633, holding the post until he retired in 1658 at seventy-four. In 1640, after Shimabara, he was appointed the first shūmon-aratame-yaku, chief of the Office for the Investigation of Religious Sects, a title generally translated as Inquisitor General on the reasonable ground that the job description matched.

As a young samurai he had served the Christian daimyō Gamō Ujisato, baptized Dom Leão, in whose personal service baptism was effectively a condition of employment. He is reported to have formally apostatized in 1625, the year he became an inspector, a coincidence of dates that requires no commentary. Japanese state records say nothing about any of it. The Jesuit António Francisco Cardim, writing in 1650, refers to him without hesitation as chicaudono, que fora christão, Chikugo-dono, who had been a Christian.

His central insight was that killing Christians did not work. The maxim that the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians was not a Christian discovery in his experience; it was an operational finding, confirmed at Nishizaka in 1622, where fifty-five people were executed in a single day before a crowd of thirty thousand and the crowd went home edified. Executions produced letters, relics, secret feast days and a permanent supply of stories. What produced nothing at all was an apostate priest, alive, fed, housed, registered at a temple and available for inspection: a living priest who had renounced his God was a standing demonstration that the God had not intervened.

He built the method around that. Long conversations, tea, courtesy, genuine interest in Western astronomy, alternating without warning with threat. Fallen priests were used as interrogators against fresh ones, since only they knew where the doctrinal joints were. Everything ended in a signed document.

In 1658 he wrote the procedure down for his successors, in a manual known as the Kirishito-ki, and its instructions are the coldest text of the period. Excessive torture is a professional failure, because it kills the subject and manufactures a martyr. The suspension pit and the mokuba, the wooden horse, must be calibrated to the individual's physical strength. A man on the wooden horse who asks for a pipe of tobacco, or to relieve himself, should be granted it, because a subject kept alive, in contact and unhumiliated remains a subject who may still recant.

Around it he assembled the apparatus: the terauke system of compulsory annual temple registration and the korobi kakimono or double oath, by which the apostate swore by the Christian God to be damned eternally should he relapse and by the Shintō and Buddhist deities that he was now orthodox.

And one further procedure, small and specific, which is where this story turns. A priest who broke was given a Japanese name, a household, a widow to marry, a temple registration and a stipend, and put to work.

The Errand

Why the Jesuits Sent the Rubino Missions to Japan in 1642 and 1643

By 1633 the mission in Japan had almost ceased to exist as an organization. In the first half of that year the underground Jesuit presence across Kyūshū was down to nine hidden priests. The sweep of that autumn took fifty-two hidden Christians and missionaries, of whom thirty-three were Jesuits, and when it was over only five hidden missionaries remained on the island and not one of them was an active Jesuit.

Among the nine had been Cristóvão Ferreira, vice-provincial, the highest-ranking member of the Society in Japan and a man who had lived underground for nineteen years. He was captured in Nagasaki on 24 September 1633. On 18 October he was suspended in the ana-tsurushi, written 穴吊し, the hanging in the pit: bound tightly to restrict circulation, lowered head down into a hole packed with offal and excreta, with a small gash cut in his forehead or temple so that blood would drain and the pressure would not kill him quickly, and his left hand left free so that he could signal. After five hours, some accounts say six, he signaled.

His story is told in full elsewhere. What matters here is what it did to the men who heard about it in Europe.

It was the greatest single propaganda catastrophe in the history of the Japan mission, and the Society's response was, on its own terms, entirely rational and completely insane. Two expeditions were organized with one explicit purpose: to enter a closed country under a death sentence, locate the apostate vice-provincial and bring him back to the Church. They are known as the Rubino Groups, after Antonio Rubino, the Italian who led the first.

The context by then was not merely hostile. It was sealed. The closure edict of 4 August 1639 had banned Portuguese shipping on pain of death, and Macau tested the proposition on 3 August 1640 by sending an embassy to Nagasaki to plead for the trade; sixty-one of the seventy-four were beheaded, the ship and cargo burned, and thirteen low-ranking crew sent home to describe what they had seen. The Rubino missions were assembled in full knowledge of this, at the Colégio de São Paulo, the launching point for clandestine entries since 1614.

The first group landed in Satsuma on 11 August 1642 and was taken almost as it stepped ashore. Rubino, Capece and Morales were put in the pit for nine days, refused to break, and were beheaded in March 1643. That is the version in the martyrologies, and it may be right. An Ōmura administrative document of 1690 complicates it considerably by implying that two or three of the Europeans did in fact apostatize, one living until 1665 and another until 1690, which cannot be reconciled with three beheadings in 1643. Somebody's record is wrong and it is not currently possible to say whose.

The second group sailed anyway.

Ten People on a Beach in Chikuzen

Who Was Giuseppe Chiara, and How Was He Captured in 1643?

They came ashore in June 1643 on Ōshima, an island off the Chikuzen coast, and the fullest account gives the date of capture as 27 June, though one statement in the record says May. There were ten of them.

Four were European priests: Pedro Marques, Alonso de Arroyo, Francisco Cassola, and a Sicilian from Palermo named Giuseppe Chiara, born in 1602 by most accounts and 1606 by some. One was a Japanese Jesuit lay brother, André Vieira. The remaining five were lay catechists and dōjuku, the mission's indispensable auxiliaries, described in the sources as two Japanese and two Chinese plus a Cantonese dōjuku recorded as Juan, who reappears in the Edo registers as Nikan Donatus.

The senior man was Marques, a former vice-provincial. Chiara was not the leader. His prominence in every modern account of the expedition is entirely retrospective, and it is the work of a novelist writing three centuries later.

They were taken immediately. The coastal watch system the shogunate had spent a decade building did precisely what it had been built to do, which is the least dramatic and most complete refutation of the enterprise imaginable. Nobody was betrayed. Nobody was hunted. Ten people arrived on a beach in a country where every beach was watched.

Their identities were confirmed at Nagasaki, where Ferreira, by then a state functionary of ten years' standing, was among those who could name them. In July they were shipped to Edo.

The novel that made this expedition famous places its priest in Japan around 1639 or 1640, arriving while the smoke of Ferreira's fall is still in the air. The actual gap between Ferreira's apostasy and Chiara's landing was ten years. In that decade the district system Alessandro Valignano had designed had ceased to exist; the rebellion had been fought and its thirty-seven thousand people killed; the country had been closed; and Ferreira had married, fathered three children, been registered at a Buddhist temple, published a refutation of Christianity and taken up employment inspecting Dutch and Chinese cargoes for contraband Bibles.

Chiara was not arriving on the heels of a scandal. He was arriving into a settled bureaucratic order, ten years old, that had already processed everyone like him.

The Room Where the Dutchmen Sat

How Inoue Broke the Priests: The Interrogations of 1643

The examinations took place at Inoue Masashige's private estate and at the mansion of the senior councilor Hotta, and they went on, intermittently, for years. The shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu attended in person several times between 1643 and 1646; a head of state does not sit in on routine religious screening. Ferreira interpreted throughout.

There were European witnesses, one of the few episodes of the persecution for which independent non-Catholic testimony survives. A party of Dutch sailors was being held in Edo at the time, seized ashore in the north during the 1643 expedition of De Vries, and they were brought in and made to watch. The vessel that appears in some sources as the Urk is almost certainly the VOC yacht Breskens, whose presence in Edo that summer was an accident of timing the shogunate converted into a demonstration.

The Dutchmen wrote down what they saw. The Jesuits looked pitiful, they recorded, their eyes and cheeks strangely fallen in, their hands black and blue. Through the interpreters the priests told them something more specific and considerably more damaging to the official version: they had not apostatized freely. The torments had broken their bodies, and what had been extracted had been extracted from bodies.

That is the whole of it. No adjectives are required and the Dutch supplied none.

Inoue's method was to find the individual seam and open it. Confronted with the standing taunt, how could they trust a God who had abandoned them so completely to the power of the shogun, one of the Jesuits answered in Portuguese that it was true these poor miserable bodies were in the shogun's power, which he would not have were it not granted him from God, and that without the true God there was no salvation. It is a good answer. It was also, in that room, an academic one.

For Cassola the tailored instrument was not the pit. Inoue had him confined in a jōrō, a women's prison, where female agents were set to work systematically on his celibacy. The calculation was that a priest broken by seduction could never afterward present himself as a martyr, to others or to himself.

Under torture in October 1643 the five catechists disclosed what Inoue most wanted, which was not theology but logistics: a Rome-sponsored program to train a continuous stream of Japanese priests at Macao and Manila for infiltration into Japan. That intelligence justified the entire apparatus in the eyes of the men who ran it.

In that same October, Giuseppe Chiara gave the signal.

So did the others, and then two of them took it back. Alonso de Arroyo revoked his apostasy almost immediately, and since suicide was forbidden him he refused all food and died of starvation in his cell. Francisco Cassola also revoked, and died in prison before November 1644. Neither man fits the clean opposition between those who break and those who do not, because both did both, in that order, which is the arrangement the archives most often show and fiction almost never does.

Pedro Marques remained apostate, took the name Heitarō, and died in Edo in 1657, recorded as aged eighty. Brother André Vieira remained apostate and died in Edo in 1678.

Chiara outlasted all of them.

A House in Kobinata

What Was the Kirishitan Yashiki, and How Did Chiara Live There?

The compound built to hold them stood in the Kobinata district of Edo, on a slope at Myōgadani, inside Inoue's own estate. Prison works began in 1643 and the finished structure was completed in 1646. It was called the Kirishitan Yashiki, 吉利支丹屋敷, the Christian Residence, a name of almost administrative sweetness for a facility whose surviving architectural detail consists entirely of the dimensions of its punishment cells: a hole about four or five feet deep with only a small opening, through which a little food could be passed.

Chiara was given a name. One tradition, preserved in Jesuit correspondence and in the Japanese record, gives 岡本三右衛門, Okamoto San'emon. The other, followed by the novelist who made him famous, gives 岡田三右衛門, Okada San'emon.

One account holds that he was married to the widow of a real samurai of that name and thereby inherited the dead man's household, his social standing and his swords, entering the warrior class by administrative fiat. Another describes his predecessor only as a deceased Japanese criminal, and is explicit that it holds no evidence about the man's status. The two readings imply opposite theories of what Inoue was doing. Absorption into the samurai class was statecraft. Installation in the household of an executed criminal was degradation dressed as a favor. The surveillance diary should settle it and has not yet been made to.

The maintenance was not stingy. He received a daily rice ration equal to that of ten men and one thousand momme of silver a year, a serious income and a deliberate one. He lived with his wife until his death.

The shogunate never for a moment believed any of it.

The proof is the internal surveillance log kept on the apostate priests. Its most famous entry concerns a suspicion that Okamoto San'emon had attempted to convert his servant. The servant's name was Kichijirō. The priest was required to swear a formal oath, a shomotsu, declaring Christianity a heresy and denying the attempt, and the oath was sealed with his handprint. The date of the entry is not preserved in the available material.

He lived in that house for forty-two years. He died on 24 August 1685, in his early eighties, the arithmetic of his birth year and his recorded age failing to close by a year in a way nobody has managed to fix. His body was cremated. Some Jesuit letters report that on his deathbed he revoked the apostasy and declared himself still a Christian, and the Society's own historians have long treated this as claimed rather than demonstrated.

The compound took one more European, Giovanni Battista Sidotti, another Sicilian of Palermo, who landed on Yakushima in 1708 dressed as a samurai, was lodged with an elderly couple who confessed in 1714 that he had baptized them, and died in one of the subterranean cells. In 2014 construction work on the Kobinata site uncovered the compound's foundations, including those cells, and the skeletal remains of three individuals, one a tall male consistent with Sidotti's unusual height.

The Novel That Came After

Is Endō Shūsaku's Silence (1966) a True Story?

Endō Shūsaku published Chinmoku in Tokyo in 1966, and every institutional fact in it is true.

That is the part usually missed in the argument about whether Silence is a true story, an argument conducted for sixty years mostly by people asking the question at the wrong resolution. The pit is real, down to the gash cut in the temple and the free left hand. The plaque is real, down to the wooden frame. Inoue Chikugo-no-kami is real, and the portrait of him is close enough to the Kirishito-ki to be called accurate. The imposed name, the imposed wife, the stipend and the surveillance diary are all documented, and Endō had read the diary. He built his ending out of it.

The concordance runs like this. Father Sebastião Rodrigues is Giuseppe Chiara, with the nationality changed from Italian to Portuguese, which serves the novel's argument and costs it nothing. Ferreira appears under his own name and does approximately what he did. The Gotō islands are the Gotō islands. Macau is Macau. Father Francisco Garrpe is invented, a composite standing in for the priests who chose to die, occupying the space of Arroyo and Cassola without their complications. The village of Tomogi is invented and placed on the real Sotome coast of the Nishisonogi peninsula, where the underground communities actually were.

Kichijirō is the interesting case. As a character, the weak man who betrays repeatedly and returns repeatedly to ask for confession, he is entirely Endō's. As a name, he is sitting in the surveillance diary, attached to the servant the historical Chiara was suspected of trying to convert, and no reader of that diary could miss him. Endō took a name out of a police file and built around it the most theologically serious figure in modern Japanese fiction.

What he compressed was time. The ten-year gap is not a small adjustment; it is the difference between a mission that might still be rescued and one that has been closed, audited and filed.

And he simplified the aftermath. In the novel the priests divide cleanly into those who die and those who fall. In the record Arroyo fell and then starved himself, Cassola fell and then died in prison, Marques fell and stayed fallen for fourteen years, and Chiara for forty-two. The historical group offers no clean dichotomy at all, only a spectrum of men doing what they could manage on a given day, which is harder to dramatize and rather more difficult to read.

It Is All Right to Step On It

What Christ Actually Says to the Priest in Silence

The one thing in the novel that no archive contains is the thing everybody remembers, which is that the plate speaks.

At the moment Rodrigues sets his foot down, Christ addresses him from the bronze. English readers know the line as an imperative, "Trample!", which is not what the Japanese says. Endō wrote 「踏むがいい」, fumu ga ii, which is not a command but a permission: it is all right to step on it, go ahead. And the pronoun Christ uses for the priest is お前, omae, the intimate form a mother uses to a son, which strips the deity of every trace of paternal judgment in the instant it matters most.

The permission is also an echo, and this is the finest piece of construction in the book. Four chapters earlier Rodrigues himself, watching captured peasants agonize over the plate, whispers to them 「踏んでもいい」, fundemo ii, an act of pity his own theology cannot license. The voice from the bronze at the end is his own transgressive compassion returned to him with authority. Whether God spoke or whether an exhausted man heard himself is a question Endō declines to close, and the refusal is the novel.

The structural divergence between the editions matters as much. In the original Japanese, the extracts from the officer's diary are not an appendix; they are the final chapter, in direct narrative sequence, so that the Japanese reader is required to accept the apostate's decades of quiet, compromised, surveilled domestic life as the resolution of the story. In William Johnston's English translation the same material is printed as detached back matter, which reframes it as scholarship and lets the reader treat the trampling as the ending. The recent work of Seungjun Lee and Soojung Park argues that this single editorial decision has shaped Anglophone reading of the book for half a century.

Their larger reading borrows a term from postwar Japanese intellectual history. Tenkō, coerced ideological conversion, was the great question of the Japanese left after the 1930s, and the critic Yoshimoto Takaaki distinguished a third form of it, in which a person abandons loyalty to a rigid external organization precisely in order to preserve the integrity of an inner conviction. Read that way, Rodrigues does not betray Christ. He betrays the institutional Church, and says so: he fell, but he did not renounce his faith, and his Lord is not the God preached in the churches. Salvation relocates from the glorious death to the dialectics of ordinary life, to farming and fishing and surviving and praying with the door shut, which is a precise description of what the hidden communities of Sotome and Gotō did for the next two hundred and twenty years.

The films have taken their own liberties. Shinoda Masahiro filmed Chinmoku in Japan in 1971, with Endō involved in the screenplay. Martin Scorsese's Silence, released in 2016 after nearly three decades of development, is faithful almost to the point of transcription, and then adds one thing at the very end: as the apostate's body goes to the fire, his Japanese wife slips a small Christian object into his hands, a crucifix in the finished film, described in some accounts as a rosary. It resolves the ambiguity that both the novel and the record leave open. What the documents attest is the cremation. Nothing else.

The Plates Go to Tokyo

When Did the Fumi-e Ceremony End?

The ceremony outlived everyone in this story by two centuries, which is the ordinary fate of a successful bureaucracy.

It ended without announcement. After Perry's squadron arrived, the Nagasaki e-fumi was quietly allowed to lapse in late 1853. Formal shogunal orders discontinuing it followed in April 1856, under pressure applied during the negotiations of 1855 and 1856 by the Dutch agent Jan Hendrik Donker Curtius. The anti-Christian notice boards, the kōsatsu, came down under international pressure in early 1873, the exact date given variously as late February or 14 March. In 1874 the plates, which had been sitting in storage in Nagasaki, were transferred to the Tokyo National Museum, where the survivors remain.

They are cataloged as art objects now. The center of each is smooth.

Between the two great collapses of this story there is a symmetry neither man could have seen. Cristóvão Ferreira, the ranking Jesuit in Japan, broke in five hours in 1633 and spent seventeen years as the state's interpreter, contraband inspector, medical author and refuter of his own religion, dying in his bed in Nagasaki on 5 November 1650, an event known only because the Dutch factory diary recorded it the following day in the tone of a man noting the weather. Giuseppe Chiara sailed a decade later for the express purpose of undoing that, was taken on a beach without a struggle, broke in the same pit, took the same kind of name, wife and stipend, and then went on living inside the arrangement for forty-two years.

The Society's own archives eventually conceded that Ferreira's redemption never happened. About Chiara the letters kept insisting, without evidence, that at the very end he found his way back, while the officer's diary went on recording a compliant householder of Kobinata who swore, under his own handprint, that the religion was a heresy and that he had never mentioned it to his servant.

Endō Shūsaku wrote his novel into the gap between those two documents. It is not a large gap. It is exactly the width of a man's private mind, which is the one thing no inquisitor ever obtained, no matter how carefully he calibrated the instrument, and the one thing the plates were never designed to measure.

Sources & Further Reading

Boxer, C. R. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650. University of California Press, 1951. Still the indispensable English framework for the edicts, the mission's finances and the mechanics of the Nagasaki magistracy that ran the e-fumi.

Cardim, António Francisco. Batalhas da Companhia de Jesus na sua gloriosa Provincia do Japão. Imprensa Nacional, 1894. The Jesuit martyrology that supplies the Rubino expeditions from the Society's own side, and the description of Inoue Masashige as a renegade Christian.

Cieslik, Hubert. The Case of Christovão Ferreira. Monumenta Nipponica, 1974. The scholarly reconstruction of Ferreira's fall, his career as Sawano Chūan and his role interpreting for both Rubino groups, and the study that dismantled the martyrdom legend.

Elison, George. Deus Destroyed: The Image of Christianity in Early Modern Japan. Harvard University Press, 1973. Contains the English translation of Ferreira's Kengiroku and the fullest account of how the shogunate turned apostates into instruments of its own religious policy.

Endō, Shūsaku. Silence. Translated by William Johnston. Picador Classic, 2015. The novel itself, and the edition in which the officer's diary appears as detached back matter rather than, as in the Japanese, the final chapter.

Farge, William J. The Japanese Translations of the Jesuit Mission Press, 1590-1614. Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. The study behind the kotsuniku problem and the revisions between the 1596 Amakusa and 1610 Kyoto editions of Contemptus Mundi.

Hesselink, Reinier H. The Dream of Christian Nagasaki: World Trade and the Clash of Cultures, 1560-1640. McFarland, 2016. The urban and administrative history of the city that invented the annual trampling ceremony and then lent its plates to the neighboring domains.

Higashibaba, Ikuo. Christianity in Early Modern Japan: Kirishitan Belief and Practice. Brill, 2001. The best account of what Japanese converts understood themselves to be doing, including the maternal turn in their devotion and the meaning they attached to stepping on an image.

Proust, Jacques. La Supercherie Dévoilée: Une réfutation du catholicisme au Japon au XVIIe siècle. Chandeigne, 1998. The French translation of Ferreira's refutation, framed by the contested argument that he had lost his faith long before the pit, a case Henrique Leitão's review demolished in 2000.

Rodrigues, Helena Barros. Father Bento Fernandes S.J. and the Clandestine Japanese Mission. Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2007. Eyewitness detail on the 1633 sweep that destroyed the underground church and produced both Ferreira's capture and the vacuum Chiara sailed into.

Turnbull, Stephen. The Kakure Kirishitan of Japan: A Study of Their Development, Beliefs and Rituals to the Present Day. Japan Library, 1998. The standard account of how the hidden communities absorbed the annual trampling into their own penitential calendar and survived it.