I'm afraid I haven't made much headway through the book yet (darn midterms), so I can't contribute to the debate at hand, but what background of the story I've gathered has been extremely troubling.
I'm actually not sure what disturbs me more, the eventual extermination of the church in Japan, or the underground church that survives today, with its bastardized Christianity.
From a 1995
article by Philip Yancey in
Christianity Today:
In the late nineteenth century, when Japan finally
permitted a Catholic church to be built in Nagasaki to serve Western
visitors, priests were astonished to see Japanese Christians streaming down
from the hills; they were Kakure, or crypto-Christians, who had been meeting
in secret for 240 years. Worship without the benefit of a Bible or book of
liturgy had taken a toll, however: their faith had survived as a curious
amalgam of Catholicism, Buddhism, animism, and Shintoism.
The Kakure had no remnant of belief in the Trinity, and over the years the
Latin words of the Mass had devolved into a kind of pidgin language: Ave
Maria gratia plena dominus tecum benedicta had become Ame Maria karassa binno
domisu terikobintsu, and no one had the slightest idea what these sounds
meant. Believers revered the "closet god," bundles of cloth wrapped around
Christian medallions and statues that were concealed in a closet disguised as
a Buddhist shrine.
Around 30,000 of these Kakure Christians still worship today, and 80 house
churches carry on the tradition of the "closet god." Roman Catholics have
tried to embrace them and bring them back into the mainstream of faith, but
the Kakure resist. "We have no interest in joining his church," said one of
their leaders after a visit from Pope John Paul II; "We, and nobody else, are
true Christians."
If God enabled the Kakure christians to survive, why did He not reveal Himself to them? Having given them the unfmathomable faith to endure, why did He not leave them His Word? There may have been reconciliation for Father Rodrigues at the end, but for the historical Japanese underground church, the silence of God went on for more than 240 years. You can say that it continues today, for those who have not been brought back to the mainstream Church.
Why would God allow this to happen? I know Endo talks about the "Japanese swamp" and the seemingly unbridgeable gap between cultures; does he strive to explain this silence on a historical scale any further?
