On January the 22nd 2017, I watched a new Martin Scorsese picture “Silence（沈黙）” based on the novel of a Japanese writer Shusaku Endo（遠藤周作）. It was a fiction story of a Portuguese priest who visited Japan in the beginning of Edo period, when the Japanese Shogunate was oppressive to Christianity. Maybe you know during the Edo period of Japan, there were Kakure Kirishitan living there secret lives as Christians and in 1873, they were rediscovered as “hidden Christians” (though their forms of beliefs were distorted during the ages). Silence was a description of taciturn God.
In the story, the priest is forced to select the deaths of everyone in glory, or apostate to save other people’s lives. It is one of the ultimate issues concerning true Christianity. There is also a doubt that the methodologies (not principles themselves) of Christianity in Western culture may not the ultimate truth common to every human being; if what Christianity says and what (Japanese) Buddhism says have some common sense from different angles (you need profound surveys to deal with this problem, which is briefly but not completely introduced in the movie). The atonement of one’s sin is the main theme underlay. What we saw is an abyss of the mind of freedom in religious beliefs, not enforced to apostate.
When we were junior high school students of a mission school, a priest of Dominican order recommended us to read the novel “Silence”. My friend said that it was almost ridiculous to let mere pupils understand the novel, but we were more or less interested in the story line based on very Japanese way of thinking.
For the sound effects, the sounds from nature with a slight sense of Japanese traditional music describe the taciturn God in the Japanese countries. We do not need gaudy sounds or camera works in this story: a plain story telling in plain English texts narrates everything without boredom. Mismatches of different human cultures also arise vividly in such a story line.
You can notice there are a few casts common to Star Wars, which resembles Japanese Nohgaku（能楽）utilizing common casts among different repertoires acted on the same day. Tadanobu Asano（浅野忠信）and Issey Ogata（イッセー尾形）did fantastic jobs as their roles in difficult multifaceted natures. Yosuke Kubodzuka（窪塚洋介）also seems to enjoy the film making. I am ashamed that the movie was taken not in Japan, but in Taiwan for some reasons. This movie is one of my favorites.
For additional description of the movie.
