Mission Trade: A Primary Goal

¶ … Mission Trade: a Primary Goal and (Questionable) Accomplishment of European Groups, as Shown within the novel Silence and the film the Mission In the book Silence (1969) by Shuzaku Endo and the movie the Mission (1986), directed by the British filmmaker Rolfe Joffe, an inherent conflict exists between two kinds of European groups who visit Asia and the Americas, in the 17th and 18th centuries in particular: tradesmen (including slave traders) and Catholic missionaries.

The work of the Catholic missionaries is more pure and heartfelt; the work of the European tradesmen more predatory and aggressive. Ultimately, although perhaps for the wrong reasons, and despite their being equal zeal for their respective religious and economic missions on the part of both the tradesmen and the missionaries, economic forces generally win out.

Groups representing European economic forces within indigenous non-Christian areas during these centuries may or may not have been more plentiful in numbers than were European religious groups, but for reasons for which the Church itself was not entirely devoid of responsibility, they were definitely more successful overall. According to the web article "Silence" by Amy Welborn, as socio-historic backdrop to Shuzaku's Silence: St. Francis Xavier brought Christianity to Japan in 1549.

Sixty years later, while there may have been an estimated 300,000 Christians in Japan, the apparent success of the Church's mission was about to come to an end. The shogun who had reunited Japan after years of civil war had grown suspicious that the foreign missionaries were paving the way for conquering powers. In 1614 missionaries were expelled from the country and Japanese Christians were presented with a choice: either apostasize [sic] or be brutally killed.

The terrible persecution of Christians in Japan in the early seventeenth century produced thousands of martyrs, a fascinating underground hybrid church called Kakuro which survived hundreds of years in secret, and an enduringly ambiguous relationship between Japanese culture and Catholicism. ("Silence") Perhaps as foreshadowing of the many future obstacles, difficulties, and dangers they will encounter, the Portuguese missionary narrator of Silence states, at the beginning of the book: "The greater part of the Japanese show no interest in our teaching" (Endo, Silence, p. 15).

This is a far different sort of opening than Roland Joffe's film the Mission, in which we see, first-hand, the enormous initial fear in the Colombian Indians' eyes when the first of the Jesuits arrives, but then, subsequently, how the Indians come to trust and even love the Jesuits. In this region, the Jesuits eventually come to represent a benevolent force against the Portuguese and Spanish tradesmen who would hunt and capture the Indians, and sell them for slaves.

The Mission explicitly contrasts the conflicting interests of the Jesuits and the other European groups of tradesmen who come to the area, and shows how the Jesuits sought to convert, but also to protect the lives of the Indians of Colombia, while the tradesmen who hunted them sought only to exploit them for profit. In both works, however, the religious groups are ultimately defeated by the forces of trade, and (in Silence) considerable resistance, within Japan itself, to the Christianity the missionaries hope to spread.

Within Silence, unlike the indigenous tribes of Colombia, for whom, the Jesuits build a mission so that they may live and work in safety, the Christian missionaries who come to Japan are arrested, tortured, and ultimately defeated. As Amy Welborn further observes, of Shuzaku Endo and Silence: As a Christian child in Japan, Endo was taunted by his peers for his religion.

As a student come to France after World War II to study Catholic novelists, his faith was irrelevant to those who may have shared it, but who deplored him nonetheless because he was Japanese.. But on the way back to Japan from Europe, Endo visited Palestine. In walking where Jesus himself had, he came to understand that the Christianity he had known was incomplete, for it had never revealed to him the Jesus who had lived, suffered and died for the outcast.

It was this Jesus, he realized, who could reach beyond culture and connect with the Japanese soul. Silence, Endo uses the background of persecution to contemplate these knotty questions. ("Silence") Endo seeks to show within Silence, then, how the missionaries themselves misunderstood which aspects of Christianity to emphasize to Japanese would-be converts, just as he himself had misunderstood the universal appeal that Christianity could potentially have in areas outside the western world, including Japan, until he had visited Palestine.

As a missionary religion, as Endo also implies, Christianity must rely on persuasive power in order to truly capture the hearts and minds of people anywhere that it seeks to convert. Japanese feudalism and European trade, on the other hand, rely only on force, coercion, and violence - no match for Christian missionaries in an area like Japan, especially if those missionaries' Christianity is not accepted in Japan in the first place.

Religious zeal, then, in order to have any real hope of vanquishing competing economic forces, must be heartfelt by considerable numbers of people, rather than rejected by them, in order for religion to have even the faintest hope of defeating the forces of trade, feudalism, or both combined.

On the other hand, in the Mission, since the Jesuits succeeded in capturing the hearts and minds of the indigenous Colombians, the indigenous peoples themselves became willing to fight the tradesmen in order to protect their own new way of life, and their church. In both stories, Christianity was defeated, but in the Mission, at least, as the end of the film showed, some vestiges of Christianity at least remained among the surviving Colombian Indians.

Both Endo's novel Silence and Rolfe Joffe's the Mission, then, suggest that European trade and European religion were major objectives, though seriously conflicting ones, of the European groups who came into contact with the peoples of the Americas from the 15th to the 18th centuries. Arguably, all such forces, including those of the Catholic Church, were disruptive and invasive, but at least within the Mission, the Catholic church was shown as bringing about some tangible benefits, in terms of shelter and safety, to the indigenous peoples they sought to convert.

In Silence, on the other hand, the Portugese Missionaries, and those who had come before them, seriously misunderstood, as Endo implies within this novel, the inherent reasons for the non-acceptance of Christianity by the Japanese. If Silence implies the blind spots of the Catholic church during these centuries, and by implication the.