Western Religion vs. Eastern Culture Theme Analysis

Rodrigues and Garrpe believe that the Christian message is so potent and essential that the entire world should hear it, ultimately leading them to Japan. However, the priests are met with little success and much suffering, and by the end of the story, Rodrigues finds himself questioning whether there is any place for Christianity to exist inside of Japan. Though himself a Roman Catholic, Endō’s novel makes the controversial suggestion that Western Christianity is incompatible with the Eastern culture of Japan, doomed to either wither away or be transformed into something else entirely.

Particularly for the oppressed Japanese peasantry, Christianity offers a vital hope and recognition of their humanity, demonstrating that the Western religion does have some utility and value for Eastern people. The peasants live on land owned by feudal lords, who tax them so heavily that they can barely scratch out a living for themselves. They exist at a level just above starvation and live in constant fear of their lords’ samurai enforcers. For such oppressed and dejected people, the attention that they receive from the missionaries and the promise of a loving deity offers “this group of people a human warmth they never previously knew.” Beyond human warmth, Christianity’s promise of paradise after death represents a relief from the peasants’ lifelong bondage. As Rodrigues observes, “These people who work and live and die like beasts find for the first time in our teaching a path in which they can cast away the fetters that bind them. The Buddhist bonzes simply treat them like cattle.” Christianity, he believes, offers hopeless Japanese peasants a promise of a better future, a relief from the suffering of their present lives. For the peasants, who lead lives of suffering, Christianity thus represents a desirable source of hope, love, and the promise of relief from their suffering and a better life after death. In this manner, as Rodrigues so firmly believes, Christianity arguably has both utility and value for the Japanese peasants that their own Buddhism, which supports the oppressive social order, does not offer them.

However, although valuable, Endō suggests through Ferreira and the Japanese officials that Western Christianity is inherently fraught with Western ideals that are incompatible with Japan’s Eastern culture. As Rodrigues argues, the idea that truth is universal (true for everyone on Earth) is a fundamental tenet of Western Christianity. However, when Rodrigues posits this idea, a Japanese official flatly disagrees. He counters that even if Christianity is true for Portugal, it may not be for Japan, suggesting that just as certain trees can only grow in certain soils, religions too may only thrive in one culture or another. Although Ferreira once led the missionary movement in Japan that produced 400,000 Christians, the former priest tells Rodrigues that he now realizes they were not practicing Christianity at all, particularly because Japanese people have no concept of God or anything that transcends their physical space. Rodrigues himself sees this emphasis on the physical world in the Japanese Christians’ obsession with crucifixes and relics, which concerns him. Ferreira recounts that rather than worshipping God as a transcendent being—who is spiritual, without physical presence—the Japanese Christians misunderstood the missionaries and worshipped the sun in the sky as God. In the same way that Buddha, though revered, is only a man, the Japanese Christians have no concept of Jesus Christ as a divine being either, picturing him only as a “beautiful, exalted man.” As Ferreira sees it, “The Japanese till this day have never had the concept of God; and they never will.” Because of their inability to even conceive of a divine presence, Ferreira suggests that the Christianity that once thrived in Japan—and has now largely died out—was not Christianity at all, and certainly not as the Portuguese believe it. Rather, he likens it to a butterfly caught in a spider’s web, drained of all its bodily fluids: the external shell remains, but the essence is completely changed.

The novel thus controversially suggests that Western Christianity must either adapt into something different that can function within an Eastern cultural context, or else leave countries such as Japan to their own devices and religious traditions. Both the Japanese officials and Ferreira liken Japan to a swamp and Christianity to a sapling planted there. The sapling might last for a few years but its roots will soon rot and the tree will die; it is planted in soil that does not suit it, arguing that Christianity is simply rooted in beliefs and assumptions that Japan does not share with the West. However, as Rodrigues weakly points out, there is the slight possibility that Christianity may take root in Japan, though it seems this could only happen if it were radically adapted and altered, which would be difficult given the missionaries’ dogmatic stance. The suggestion that Western Christianity is incompatible with Japan’s Eastern beliefs—which strongly contradicts the idea of Christianity being universally true for all people—is particularly poignant given that Endō himself is a Japanese Roman Catholic. That he writes from the experience of an individual caught between opposing cultural and religious forces suggests that the difficult conflict of the novel between Christianity and Japan reflects his own internal conflicts between his ethnic heritage and his religious beliefs.

Endō’s novel is neither overwhelmingly critical nor optimistic of Christianity’s attempts to take root in Japan, but instead highlights the clash of culture and worldview that makes such a prospect, though perhaps desirable on its surface, seem nearly impossible.