An Englishman transitions from navigator for a Dutch trading ship to a samurai in service of a shōgun, or military ruler of Japan, in the 1980 American miniseries Shōgun, based on the novels by James Clavell. A similar story of transformation – American civil war veteran to member of a samurai resistance – plays out in the 2003 film The Last Samurai.
Martin Scorsese returns to the occasionally prickly topic of Christianity and Europeans in Japan with his adaptation of Silence, the acclaimed 1966 novel by Shūsaku Endō. Silence, starring Liam Neeson, Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver, has been screened for a private audience at the Vatican and will be released in the United States of America on December 23.
Endō’s historical novel is based on the true story of Cristóvão Ferreira, a 17th century Portuguese Jesuit priest who in the face of torture renounced the Catholic Church. Ferreira later became a Buddhist, married a Japanese woman and was witness to the trials of other Jesuits, but the book and the film follows two Jesuits who have been tasked with confirming reports that Ferreira had indeed renounced their faith.
Christians in Japan had been persecuted well before Ferreira ever reached those islands. Arriving soon after European traders in the 16th century, missionaries frequently fell afoul of local authorities and were often singled out as examples to the rest of the community.
But the first time missionaries were ever killed in Japan was in a dramatic turn of events in 1597, when the Japanese Imperial Regent ordered 26 Christian missionaries, both European and Japanese, to be crucified.
One of these 26 was a middle-aged lay brother of the Franciscan order, Gonsalo Garcia, who happens to the first canonised Christian saint to have been born in India.
The remarkable story of how Garcia made the winding journey from India to his death in Japan begins in 1556 in Bassein, a sprawling Portuguese fortified town on the west coast of India that is now Vasai, a distant suburb of Mumbai.
Hulking remnants of churches and roofless monasteries now mark the ruins of the fortified town. Yet while the settlement might have crumbled, Catholics continue to mark Garcia’s feast day every February 6 in the Jesuit church, one of the best preserved structures in Vasai.
Young Garcia was born at a time of intense religious fervour in Spain, Portugal and their territories around the world. The Portuguese government began its infamous Inquisition in its Indian territories in 1560, the year Garcia would have turned four. Bassein was the seat of one such Commissary.
Garcia was what the Portuguese called mestizo – of mixed racial origin. His father was a Portuguese soldier who later gave up his job for a civilian posting, and his mother was an Indian from Agashi, a village off Bassein.
As the child of a European, Garcia was raised and educated as a Catholic. Even Hindus living in and around Bassein were regularly rounded up and made to attend church services every alternate Sunday. In this atmosphere, it is not surprising that Garcia’s childhood ambition was to join the church, and the order he most wanted to join was that of his mentor, a Jesuit priest called Sebastian Gonsalves.
The Catholic order was at this point very young, having been founded only in 1540 “for the defence and propagation of the faith”. Priests such as Gonsalves would have been among its earliest members.
The order made rapid expansions in Asia, establishing bases in India, the Philippines and China, deftly combining spreading the message of Christianity with participating in the trade of everything from silver to slavery. In the 1550s, they turned their attention to Japan, where a nascent network of European traders had just begun to form.
Though Garcia wanted very much to join the Jesuits, the Society had qualms because of his mixed racial heritage. Garcia remained keen despite the potential rebuffs ahead and when he turned 16, he and Gonsalves set off to join the Jesuits in their grand mission to bring Christianity to Japan.
The first missionary to land in Japan in 1549 was none other than Francis Xavier, a founding member of the Jesuits. A little more than a decade later, Jesuits baptised a Japanese daimyo, or lord, and obtained rights to settle at Nagasaki. This port became a safe haven for European missionaries and traders and Japanese Christians until the grisly crucifixions of 1592.
In his stellar history of Christian Nagasaki, Reinier Hesselink recounts the politics at play. The Jesuits, he said, were not particularly successful in proselytising at first:
When [the Jesuits] changed direction, in the early 1560s, and became interpreters and agents for, as well as manipulators of, the trade brought by the Portuguese, the numbers of baptisms had begun to rise, but simultaneously the order’s involvement in the dangerous game of power politics in the final stage of Japan’s civil war brought complications they were unable and unwilling to face.
Garcia proved to be an adept linguist on the voyage to Japan and once he arrived, the Jesuits appointed him as catechist, to educate locals in the message of Christianity. At some point between his arrival in Japan in 1573 and 1587, Garcia seems to have abandoned his hope of joining the Jesuits and left their service. Instead of going home to India, he set up base in Japan as a trader instead.
Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries had discovered just how lucrative trade with China and Japan could be. Through their exploration of the Americas, they had discovered vast reserves of silver that gave them considerable bargaining power in Asia for goods such as tea, silk, spices and porcelain that were highly valued in Europe.
It is unclear what the nature of Garcia’s trade in Japan was, but Angus Maddison in his history of world economy describes the flow of goods:
Portuguese ships were able to bring Indonesian spices from Malacca to Macao, sell them in China, buy Chinese silks and gold, go from Macao to harbours in the south of Japan (first Hirado and then Nagasaki), sell these products, buy Japanese silver, sell it in Macao, and buy silk again for shipment to Japan or their depot in Goa.
Also among the goods traded were weaponry, ship building and mapmaking skills, and humans. Jesuits were the conduit for this trade, working as translators and arbiters between merchants and locals, and pocketing a fair share of profits in the bargain.
A Franciscan welcome
After spending years in trade in Japan, Garcia finally managed to partially fulfill his old dream of formally joining the church in 1587 when the Franciscan Order in Manila accepted him as a lay brother. The Franciscans were Spaniards who were also angling for entry into the lucrative trade in China. Since Jesuits were already in Japan, Pope Gregory XIII forbade the Franciscans from entering the country.
Manila happened to be the home port of the famous Manila Galleons. These slaving ships transported people from India, China, the Philippines and even Japan across the Pacific to be sold in Acapulco, Mexico. This trade was not entirely long distance. Shorter routes were also used to sell kidnapped Japanese to China, kidnapped Chinese to Portuguese colonies in India and kidnapped Indians back across to east Asia and beyond.
In 1587, the same year the Franciscans accepted Garcia, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, a general who had united a fractious Japan after decades of civil war to become Imperial Regent, ordered all 113 Jesuits to be expelled from the country for aiding Portuguese slavers and arms traders.
The Franciscans saw their chance and again requested permission to travel to Japan. The Spanish Governor of Manila sent Father Pedro Bautista y Belasquez, a Franciscan priest from Toledo, to be his representative in Japan in 1593. Bautista took with him lay brother Garcia to serve as translator.
(It was a different matter that few Jesuits actually left Japan – the captain of the ship that was to take them away made the flimsy excuse that he had no room for them. The same ship had previously transported thousands of slaves.)
Shipwreck and blunders
The Franciscans did not fare much better than the Jesuits.
In 1596, a Spanish galleon headed from Manila to Acapulco was thrown off course by a storm and was shipwrecked off the coast of Shikoku, Japan. When Hideyoshi had the goods confiscated as state property, the ship’s captain seems to have blustered to Japanese officials about the might, wealth and reach of the Spanish Empire in an attempt to recover the cargo. He also spoke of how the Spanish king used missionaries to infiltrate local populations, convert them to Christianity and so undo local powers from within.
It did not help when Bautista, having met the captain, claimed to Hideyoshi that the goods were the property of the Franciscans who served the Spanish king.
At the end of 1596, Hideyoshi ordered the Franciscans to be arrested and made an example of. Twenty-six Christians, both European and Japanese, were rounded up in Kyoto in the north and made to march almost 1,000 kilometres south to Nagasaki for their execution. Garcia was among this number, as were three Japanese Jesuits who happened to be swept up in the arrests.
On February 5, 1597, the Christians were crucified near the shore, within sight of European ships anchored in the bay. After they died, locals ran to dip cloths into their blood, to gain what they hoped would become holy relics. In 1862, Pope Pius IX canonised all 26.
Government policies continued to suppress Christianity in Japan. An entire community of Japanese Christians, known as kakure kirishitan, went underground, disguising their beliefs in the metaphors of ancestral gods and adapting prayers to sound like Buddhist hymns. And in 1633, in the face of torture and persecution, a priest called Cristóvão Ferreira recanted his faith.