Gracie Watkins
Professor Joe Pulido
Modern Civilizations
6 February 2015
Shusaku Endo’s Silence Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence takes place during the 1600’s in Japan, mostly Nagasaki. During this time, the land of Japan was unified under the leadership of Tokugawa Ieyasu, who by 1600 had formed a strong unification in Japan on a political and societal level. Endo’s story about the missionary work of Padre Sebastian Rodrigues takes place during the Tokugawa Era (1600-1868). A shift of power had happened from the main city of Kyoto to Edo (modern day Tokyo), a small fishing town that became a thriving metropolis. Endo’s Silence bridges the Warring States Era into the Tokugawa Era. The Warring States Era was a very militaristic period when the
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Starting in 1637, they are given permission, along with a few other men, from their superiors to secretly enter Japan and investigate the persecution of the Christians. At this time in Japan, Christianity was outlawed. The Christians were being investigated, tortured, and murdered. Rodrigues and Garrpe’s mission was to convert the Japanese people as well as serve the already existing Christians in secret. Their mentor, Father Ferreira, had reportedly apostatized underneath the crushing power of the Japanese, and both were curious as to find out why. The first part of the story is told through letters written by Rodrigues until the Japanese government captures him. The story is then shifted into third person, and the reader loses the interior thoughts of Rodrigues. At first, Rodrigues is sure that the reason why faith in Christianity is so lacking in Japan is because of their lack of priests and churches. The blind faith they go into Japan with is what makes their questioning of faith so huge. Rodrigues and Garrpe are Roman Catholics from Portugal. During their time of entering Japan, the Christian faith was strictly forbidden and any previous roots by past missionaries had been all but all but ripped …show more content…
Rodrigues never does this. Even after he apostatizes, he still has his belief, and in some way it comes out stronger in the end of the book than it was in the beginning. In the beginning of the book, it was a sort of blind faith, where God answers all prayer and can heal any situation. After being in the middle of everything, within the heart of true believers dying for their Lord, I think his faith becomes stronger after all the trials he is put through throughout his
In The Samurai’s Garden by Gail Tsukiyama, a young man is thrown from his established world, left in a new, confusing realm that holds more than meets the eye. In the midst of a violent and ferocious war between the Chinese and Japanese in mid 1937, this young man, Stephen, contracts tuberculosis, and is sent to his family’s summer house in Japan. There he meets the house’s caretaker, Matsu, a simple and reserved man who holds back all but the most necessary speech. This meeting will come to define many of Stephen’s interactions with others throughout the novel: reserved and limited. In this odd land filled with subtle secrets and unspoken uncomfortability, Stephen is prepared for a very quiet and restful period, marked with healing and growth.
In An Account, Much Abbreviated, of The Destruction of The Indies, the author is giving an introduction on Bartolome De Las Casas who was a Christian missionary at the time of the Spaniards discovering the New World. He had a rather self-taught oriented theology, philosophy and law. He went to Hispaniola ten years after its discovery in 1502 ; in Santo Domingo he was ordained priest in 1512 and a year later he went as a chaplain in the expedition that conquered Cuba . After going to Hispaniola years after Columbus settled there, he did not support what the Spaniards did to the indigenous people. From 1551 until his death , Las Casas role was to bring the complaints to the authorities of the indigenous population of the Spanish America. Dissatisfied
Rodriguez makes a point of stating that there are tensions between the “brother religions”, religions that should be unified but instead are “united and divided by the masculine sense of faith”, still this same pattern is shown within the church (146). Rodriguez acknowledges the fact that the church is being divided each day due
The establishment of the Japanese archipelago assumed its present shape around 10,000 years ago. Soon after the era known as the Jomon period began and continued for about 8,000 years. Gradually they formed small communities and began to organize their lives communally. Japan can be said to have taken its first steps to nationhood in the Yamato period, which began at the end of the third century AD. During this period, the ancestors of the present Emperor began to bring a number of small estates under unified rule from their bases around what are now Nara and Osaka Prefectures. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Tokugawa Ieyasu set up a government in Edo (now Tokyo) and the Edo period began. The Tokugawa regime adopted an isolationist policy that lasted for more than 200 years, cutting off exchange with all countries except China and the Netherlands. The age of the Samurai came to and end with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and a new system of government centered on the Emperor was set up. The new government promoted modernization, adopted Western political, social and economic systems, and stimulated industrial activity. The Diet was inaugurated, and the people began to enjoy limited participation in politics.
The Tokugawa period, also known as Edo period (1603-1867), was the final period of traditional Japan that lasted for more than 250 years (britannica.com,2013). The period was a time of internal peace, political stability, and economic growth under the Shogunate founded by Tokugawa Ieyasu. The Tokugawa Shoguns maintained strict control over the structure of society by keeping a firm control over what they were allowed to do and what they were not allowed to do.
Examining the problems facing Father Rodrigues from a Christian perspective, then, is critical to the endeavor of understanding their significance to him and the Church at the time, and also to passing an ultimate judgment on the validity and worth of the decisions he makes, as many of us seem overeager to do. To that end, this paper will consider, in a Catholic frame of mind, and with attention to the opinions some noted Christian/Catholic thinkers would have held, the difficulties surrounding Rodrigues' apostasy, and his solutions to them. As all of the thinkers are themselves from the medieval era, it is not unlikely that Father Rodrigues, living in the 17th century, would have studied their works.
Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence is truly a magnificent work of art. The author does a fantastic job of describing the plight of Catholic missionaries during the Japanese oppression of Catholics. During this time period the Japanese were insensitive to God, sin, and death. During the 1600s both Catholic Missionaries and Japanese converts were heavily persecuted by Japan. In addition after the recent Shimabara Rebellion (led by Christians), the Japanese government became even more hostile towards priests in Japan.The novel starts out by describing how extremely closed off Japanese society was in this time period. At the same time Endo describes how Japanese Christians kept the faith alive through secret organizations. Silence tells the long journey and story of Sebastion Rodrigues, a Jesuit priest. In 1637, he leaves for Japan alongside two other priests. They plan to go to Japan to do missionary work and to find out the truth about their teacher, Christovao
"Shogun" is a book written by a famous writer James Clavell telling us about the way of life, customs and traditions existing in feudal Japan in the sixteenth century and about life and adventures of one shipwrecked English ship pilot who suddenly finds himself in medieval Japan with its rival war-lords, samurai, seppuku, geishas and other things and notions looking strange and even wild for a European man.
He has not stopped believing in God, however. Perhaps he has stopped believing in the particular God he has grown up worshiping. The last sentence shows us that he still believes that there is a God, he simply no longer trusts him. He feels as though his people have been betrayed and God is allowing the Jews to become victims for no apparent reason.
In the beginning Adam and Eve betrayed God, Kane killed Abel, Brutus betrayed Cesar, Judas betrayed Jesus, and so on and so forth. Major movies and books have their plot centered around betrayal. Betrayal is even prominent in human lives. Moreover it is something that humans have experienced and seen throughout their entire lives. Even when someone hears this word “Betrayal” we are left with a bad taste in his or her mouths. To Christians, more than likely, the betrayal of Jesus is the first and the worst one they can think of, the savior who came to save man, but was killed because a man’s, Judas, eventual betrayal. Throughout “Silence” we see the idea of betrayal come up time after time. On top of that theme we see the events of Judas and Jesus central to Rodrigues’ life. He had his mentor Ferreira leave the faith and become and apostate, as well as Rodrigues himself being betrayed by someone he thought to be his friend, and finally his own road to become and apostate so that he could live. In the beginning Rodrigues went from a man who thought that Jesus hated or disliked Judas because of his betrayal, which helped form, his theology towards his mentor as well as Kichijiro. This theology was not only questioned throughout the book and his real life, but is something that changed drastically. He thought he was like a Jesus figure in the lives of these betrayers but learned very quickly that this was nowhere near to the
Every step of the way, he is forsaking his god. He slowly succumbs to sin
Hamlet once said, “To be, or not, to be, that is the question”. This famous statement expresses Hamlet’s moral dilemma between life and death just as Rodrigues’ chooses between dying a “glorious” martyrdom or betraying his faith. On his critically-acclaimed novel, Silence, Shusaku Endo depicts different acts of betrayal to interpret his version of Christianity. Endo uses Rodrigues, Kirchijiro and Ferreira to represent different types of betrayal of faith affecting the novel as a whole. Through their betrayal, Endo portrays the weakness of humanity and its downfall but also shows God’s grace for the choice of redemption.
The Story of Christianity is a very informative summation; a continuation of Volume 1 which covered the beginning of the church up to the Protestant Reformation, while Vol. 2 dealt with the Protestant Reformation up to more modern time period. This author delivers a more comprehensive and deeper look into the development of Christianity, which includes particular events which had transpired throughout the world; particularly how Christianity has expanded into Central and South America. Gonzalez opens up this book with the “Call for Reformation,” where he shares with his readers the need for reform; the papacy had started to decline and was corrupt, in addition to the Great Schism, which had further weakened the papacy (p.8). The author explains how the church was not the only issue but that the church’s teachings were off track as well, seeing that the people had deviated from...
Although Hideyoshi did much to settle Japan and increase trade with the outside world, by the time of his death in 1598 internal disturbances still had not been completely eliminated. The real isolation and unification of Japan began with the inauguration of the great Tokugawa rule. In 1603 Tokugawa Ieyasu, a former associate of both Hideyoshi and Nobunaga, formally became Shogun of Japan, after defeating Hideyoshi's son Hideyori at the battle of Seki ga Hara.
Our preliminary class gave a brief, yet detailed outline of major events affecting the East Asian region. Within that class, prompted by our limited geographical knowledge of Asia, we were given a fundamental explanation of the geographical locations of the various events taking place in the region. In subsequent classes, we were introduced to the major wars, political shifts, and economic interests which shaped Japan, China and Korea to what they are today. We examined the paradigm of pre-modern Japanese governance, the Shogunate, and the trained warriors which defended lord and land, Samurai. In addition, we examined the socio-economic classes of Medieval Japan, which included the Samurai, peasants, craftsmen, and the merchants. We also examined pre-1945 Japan’s policies toward foreign entities, notably the Sakoku Policy, which sought to expunge all foreign presence and commerce in an effort to protect its borders and culture. 1945, however, saw ...