The Masters of Cinema Series

Catalogue

Shinoda’s Silence

by Doug Cummings, 2007

As one of the key members of the informal Japanese New Wave of the 1960s, Masahiro Shinoda was a youthful survivor of World War II, an event that so marked his psyche, he has been attempting to understand his country’s national character ever since. “I was willing to sacrifice my life for the emperor,” he told Kinema Junpo in 1986. “Ever since then, I have wondered about the roots of my patriotism. It is still an enigma for me. How can such absolutism take hold of any individual? Why did this moral imperative persist in Japan as a social phenomenon?”

Shinoda’s early major films feature protagonists obsessed with absolutes in their fated rush to self-destruction: the pro-imperialist ronin in Assassination (Ansatsu, 1964) and the enraptured merchant in Double Suicide (Shinju-ten Amijima, 1969) are prime examples, both of them lunging toward their goals with violent urgency. “Violence is at the root of all human passion,” Shinoda told film scholar Joan Mellen in her 1975 book, Voices from the Japanese Cinema, “the fundamental enthusiasm of the human being.” For Shinoda, visionaries are both victimisers and victims in a world perpetually defined by struggle. (Is it any wonder that his three favourite films—according to the list he gave Sight & Sound’s 2002 world poll—are Intolerance, Ivan the Terrible, and Lawrence of Arabia?)

Shinoda’s perspective is one of several that contribute to his 1971 adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s 1966 Silence (Chinmoku), a highly acclaimed novel that profoundly merges Eastern and Western literary, philosophical, and religious concerns. Endo (1923-’96), who collaborated with Shinoda on the screenplay, was raised in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, but moved back to Japan at the age of ten, where his recently-divorced mother converted to Catholicism and bequeathed her faith to Endo, baptising him the next year. It was an extraordinarily unusual decision in a nation where Christians numbered less than one percent of the total population (and still do), and it set a life course for Endo, the spiritually minded Japanese outsider fascinated by the remote West. Shortly after World War II, Endo earned a degree in French literature at Keio University, and became one of the first postwar Japanese students to study abroad, researching modern Catholic literature in 1950 at the University of Lyons. It was so soon after the war, Japan hadn’t yet renewed her peace treaties and thus didn’t even have an embassy in France; exchange students were virtually ambassadors.

Fortunately for Endo, Catholic thought in postwar France was in the midst of intellectual revival and reform. Philosophers like Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier grappled with theology and modernity; before the war, Mounier had founded Esprit, a radical cultural review that, among other things, inspired Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement in New York, and later published the early film criticism of André Bazin. Endo focused on writers he called the “grands écrivains of French literature”—François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Julien Green—Catholic novelists who specialized in vivid descriptions of personal struggles, religious doubts, and dark nights of the soul. (Their novels were later direct influences on Graham Greene and Flannery O’Connor.)

But if the war experience provoked a cultural dialogue about spirituality and meaning, it also renewed interest in the works of provocative writers like the Marquis de Sade. In his introduction to his 1965 novel Foreign Studies (Ryugaku), Endo describes a setting that foreshadows his vision of the plight of the hapless Christians in Silence:

I was intrigued as to why the originator of ‘Sadism’ should be the focus of such attention. Part of the answer lies in a consideration of the war and the concentration camps. Massacre and torture were not perpetrated only in the concentration camps; the city of Lyons where I lived was the scene of similar atrocities. The building in which the Nazis tortured members of the French Resistance still stood in the center of Lyons and one could see into the underground chamber from the pavement. Often, on my way to and from the university, I would peer into that underground chamber. It was dark and I was unable to distinguish anything clearly. But on such occasions I would say to myself, ‘This is like the inner recesses of the human soul—dark and unfathomable.’ I do not believe that this instinct was mistaken. The impulse towards sadistic behavior lies hidden in man’s deep psyche, transcending all considerations of intellect, rationality and morality.

Though he initially flourished in his French milieu, Endo began to feel more and more isolated from Western thought. (“The more I came into contact with European art and culture, the more aware did I become that they derived from emotions and a sensibility which remained alien to me.”) Cultural divides—in true Shinoda fashion—had already begun expressing themselves through violence; anti-colonial uprisings had occurred in Madagascar and Algeria in the late-‘40s, and the French Indochina War was in full swing.

No doubt the intense political discourse resulting from postwar decolonizing informed Endo’s thinking in regards to Western imperialism and Christian evangelism: in Silence, he makes it clear that missionaries were often at the forefront of international trade, blending Church and State in ways that ultimately compromised both of their interests. Shinoda’s adaptation also notes the military component of evangelistic endeavors, which introduced sophisticated European weaponry to Japan (showing favoritism to feudal lords who were loyal to the Christian faith). Endo’s 17th century fictionalized protagonist Araki Thomas in Foreign Studies “senses a contradiction between the true spirit of Christianity and the aggressive penetration into the Orient being perpetrated by the Christian Church in Europe at the time … [Thomas] was also painfully aware of the numerous poor Japanese who were dying as a result of the Church’s determination to proceed with this policy.” This latter point, in particular, would become a major theme in Silence.

Thus began a deep bifurcation within Endo that would remain a part of him and his writing throughout his life: the Western-Christian side and the Eastern-Japanese side, both psychological hemispheres yearning for solidarity but refusing cohesion. Philosophical rifts, religious fervor and weakness, suffering innocents, martyrs and apostates, and the clash of cultures became reigning motifs in his works, which amassed numerous literary awards; a museum in his honour now exists by the sea in the Sotome region of Nagasaki and contains over 25,000 exhibits, including a nearby monument to Silence with the cryptic inscription: “Humanity is so sad, Lord, and the ocean so blue.”

Though Shinoda provides a cursory prologue, initial encounters with the film (and the novel) benefit from historical overview. Following the return of Christopher Columbus, naval superpowers Spain and Portugal signed a treaty in 1494 that divided the partially explored lands outside Europe between themselves; Japan technically fell under Portuguese territory, although it wasn’t until 1547 that Portuguese emissaries ever set foot in Japan, which by then had been immersed in a period of intense civil war for nearly a century. The Sengoku (“Warring States”) Period was a time of continual warfare, with multiple regional lords attempting to usurp power and reign over Japan. Soon, the Portuguese instituted a lucrative market for silk trade between Macao and Japan, and Jesuit missionaries (beginning with Francis Xavier) accompanied them, attempting to convert Japanese rulers (and, by extension, their subjects), region by region. In 1580, an Italian, Alessandro Valignano, even established Catholic seminaries in Japan and Macao, and achieved such a success in Nagasaki, the converted authorities granted Jesuits ownership of the seaport.

The Warring States period, however, drew to a close; by 1590, Japan was unified by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who placed Nagasaki under his direct supervision and initiated the first persecution of Christians, particularly after Spaniards (who had long wanted trade access to Japan) landed in 1597 and convinced him Jesuits were merely paving the way for Portuguese conquest. Hideyoshi was succeeded by the Tokugawa shogunate, which firmly rejected Christianity, but tried to maintain trade with Portugal and Spain. (“The introduction of the gun was a traumatic event and had a much deeper impact than Christianity,” Shinoda told Mellen. “The Japanese people were perplexed, but they are a realistic people and they made their choices pragmatically, giving up the metaphysical. We are empiricists, materialists.”) By the time Dutch and British traders arrived, promoting the Protestant Reformation and inciting discord against their Catholic competitors, the Tokugawa had had enough. Christianity was officially banned in 1614 and religious persecution began in earnest, with mass tortures, deportations, and executions defining the era. (In Silence, the lord of Chikugo, Inoue, compares this decision to a man who banishes four quarreling concubines.) In 1635, the Tokugawa shogunate declared the Sakuko, or “Closed Country” edict that initiated an anti-European, isolationist policy that would remain in effect for nearly 250 years.

Japanese Christians were forced underground and attempted to maintain their faith for centuries without trained priests, translated scriptures, or a full knowledge of the mass. Over time, this resulted in a fascinating hybrid religious community of “kakure kirishitan[s]” who incorporated secret rituals, Buddhist and Shinto traditions, and a mishmash of pidgin Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish words. In Shinoda’s film, a statue of the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy, Kannon (or Guan Yin)—also referenced in Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff (Sansho dayu, 1954)—is seen as a stand-in for the Virgin Mary. Similarly, after the heated exchange between Fathers Ferreira and Rodrigues questioning the ability of orthodox Christianity to survive in Japan, Shinoda rack focuses to a statue of Dainichi, the “Cosmic Buddha” associated with the rhetoric of Francis Xavier.

After Japan reinstated relations with the West in 1858, attempts were made to reinstate the kakure kirishitan to their Roman Catholic origins, but many resisted, preferring their indigenous faith preserved through generations of spilled blood. In 1895, building finally commenced on the first Catholic church in Japan in centuries, the grand Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki; but with cruel irony, the church was obliterated by the atom bomb in 1945, decimating Japan’s Catholic community once again.

After an introductory prologue and credit sequence, Shinoda’s film begins with Fathers Rodrigues (David Lampson) and Garrpe (Don Kenny) smuggling themselves by night onto a Japanese shore at the behest of their dubious guide, Kichijiro (cult character actor Makoto “Mako” Iwamatsu). They’re searching for Father Ferreira (Japanese actor Tetsuro Tanba in heavy make-up) and hope to evangelize along the way. Unlike the novel—which details the priests’ voyage from Portugal around the tip of Africa, past India, to Macao and Japan, Shinoda opens on a note of geographical uncertainty that he maintains throughout the picture (despite a few references to place names). It’s a piecemeal approach composed of nearly abstracted, mountainous landscapes, seaside cliffs, and fragmented glimpses of villages or rooms that are wholly disconnected for the viewer, alienating the setting and generating a palpable sense of an inscrutable habitat. On at least two occasions—early in the film on a distant hillside and later when Rodrigues is captured—characters appear out of nowhere simply on account of an edit, breaking into the narrative with a new camera angle.

Shinoda is aided greatly by famed cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, who lensed Mizoguchi’s late masterpieces as well as films such as Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) andYojimbo (1961), and Ozu’s Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1959). Shooting on a newly developed Fuji stock, Shinoda—an avid admirer of classical Japanese painting—desaturates the colors in a style reminiscent of early woodblock prints, and emphasises a flattened, limited sense of perspective. Although long shots abound in the film much more than average, they do little to organise the setting; instead, they continually highlight individuals within their environment. (“European films are based upon human psychology,” Shinoda generalised to Mellen, “American films upon action and the struggles of human beings, and Japanese films upon circumstance. Japanese films are concerned with what surrounds the human being.”)

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END OF EXCERPT – The final half of this essay can be found in the accompanying MoC booklet for this release.