On a hill overlooking Sotome is a museum to the memory of Japan's most famous Catholic novelist, Shusaku Endo. His widow chose the site because Sotome was the setting for one of his most famous books, Silence, about the period of persecution.
It is about the apostasy of a Jesuit missionary, who was in real life Christovao Ferreira, the Portuguese provincial who recanted in 1632, after six hours in a pit of excreta. The fact that he was the leader of the mission sent shockwaves through the community.
The novel is about one of Ferreira's former pupils who was himself smuggled into Japan after the ban, in the hope of finding what happened to Ferreira. He was aided by the believers, until an informer gave him away to the authorities.
The climax of the novel comes when he meets Ferreira, who has become a Japanese, given the name, wife and children of Sawano Chuan, an executed man, and translates foreign books on astronomy and medicine. 'The one thing I know is that our religion does not take root in this country,' he said to his former pupil. 'The Japanese are not able to think of God completely divorced from man. They cannot think of an existence that transcends the human.'
If statistics are to be believed, then the apostate is right. When it occupied Japan in 1945, the US made it easy for foreign missionaries to come, believing that the spread of Christianity would prevent a return of militarism.
Since the end of the occupation in 1952, the Japanese government has continued to allow easy access to missionaries and imposes no legal restrictions on Christianity. But it remains a tiny minority.
