Excerpt coming from Term Newspaper:
Certainly, the Japanese persecutors were well-aware of the concept of sacrifice in Christianity that they even employed this being a bait to convince Father Rodrigues to renounce his faith: “It is only a formality. What do formalities subject?… Only proceed through with the outdoor of trampling. “
Of course , the act of trampling on the fumie can also be interpreted two ways: one can possibly assume that Daddy Rodrigues opted for step on the fumie due to soundness with the said argument, although for the Japanese contemporary society, which usually takes actions because the embodiment of an person’s thoughts and feelings, this course of action simply and ultimately suggests the priest’s renunciation of his hope. Gessel (1999) explicated that Father Rodrigues’s gesture of putting his foot within the fumie is a symbol of setting aside every one of the religious debates that business lead only to discord and is executing an act of empathy… By “losing his life” as a Catholic priest, Rodrigues found the meaning of his mission to Japan, which is simply to make the lives of the humble plus the powerless manageable (45).
This kind of analysis likewise reflects the contradiction between Father Rodrigues as a European Catholic priest and another character, japan Kichijiro, as being a Japanese Christian-turned-traitor in the book. Unlike Dad Rodrigues, Kichijiro chose to be a traitor instead of experience struggling by sacrificing and admitting that he’s a Western Christian. Rodrigues and Kichijiro represent the opposite sides of the religious variety in Asia, wherein Rodrigues’ mindset required him to produce a sacrifice based on his trust, while Kichijiro remained faithful to his identity because Japanese, regardless of fact that he was converted and has become a person in the Christian community (Snyder, 1999: 192).
The concept of absolute, wholehearted love is inevitably linked with sacrifice, because it is only through the occurrence of complete, utter, absolute, wholehearted love that sacrifice becomes possible and bearable. Complete, utter, absolute, wholehearted love is interpreted inside the novel not really on confident terms, nevertheless on the unfavorable conditions of human existence, as illustrated in the lives of Japanese Christians (Anderson, 2000: xv). Rodrigues’s comprehension of unconditional like in Christianity is represented in his thoughts about enduring, a direct contrast to the pain relief that the Japan shogunate agreed to those who renounced their Christian faith. In the novel, truth and trust is equated with unconditional love, the capacity of the individual to look beyond the succinct, pithy in life, and create meaning and goal in the “ragged and dirty”:
No, number Our Master had looked out the tattered and the filthy. Thus he reflected when he lay in bed. Among the people who appeared inside the pages of Scripture, these whom Christ had looked after in love had been the woman of Capharnaum with the issue of blood, the lady taken in coition whom males had wished to stone – people with not any attraction, zero beauty. Anyone could be attracted by the fabulous and the captivating. But may such appeal be named love? True love was to acknowledge humanity when wasted like rags and tatters…
Bibliography
Anderson, G. (2000). With Christ in Prison: Jesuits in Prison from St Ignatius to the current. NY: Fordham UP.
Gessel, V. (1999). “The Highway to the Lake: The Hype of Endo Shusaku. inch In Stock and Past: Fiction in Contemporary Japan. S. Snyder and G. Philip (Eds. ). Honolulu: Univ. Of Hawaii Press.
Snyder, S i9000. And G. Philip. (1999). Oe and Beyond: Hype in Contemporary Japan. Honolulu: Univ. Of
