Silence Read Free Page B

is impossible to say where the city boundaries are. The Chinese houses stretch out like dust. But anyhow, no matter how many towns and cities of our country you imagine you can never get a picture of what it is like. The population is said to be about twenty thousand, but this number is almost certainly false. The only thing here that might recall our own country are the governor’s palace, the Portuguese warehouses and the cobbled roads. A fortress with cannons stands facing out into the bay, but fortunately until this day the cannons have never had to go into action.
    The greater part of the Chinese show no interest in our teaching.
    On this point Japan is undoubtedly, as Saint Francis Xavier said, ‘the country in the Orient most suited to Christianity’. However, ironically enough, as a result of the Japanese government’s forbidding ships of its own country to go to foreign lands, the monopoly of the silk trade in the whole Far East has now fallen into the hands of the Portuguese merchants in Macao so that the total income of this import is expected to rise to four hundred seraphim as opposed to one hundred seraphim last year and the year before.
    Today I have wonderful news for you. Yesterday we at last succeeded in meeting a Japanese. Formerly it seems that quite a number of Japanese religious and merchants came to Macao, but with the closing of their country such visits were brought to an end and even the few who were here returned to their own country. Even when we asked Valignano we got the answer that there were no Japanese in this town. And yet, quite by chance we found that there was a Japanese living in the midst of the Chinese in this town. Let me tell you how we came to meet him.
    Yesterday—an awfully rainy day—we visited the Chinese sector of the town to see if we could somehow get a ship bound secretly for Japan. We wanted to find a captain and sailors. Macao in the rain.   …The rain makes this wretched town even more wretched. The whole place was shrouded in ashen grey, while the Chinese, huddled in little houses that looked like dog-kennels, left the dirty streets so deserted that there was not a shadow of life in them. As I look at such streets I think (I wonder why?) of the mystery of human life—and then I grow sad.
    Going to the house of the Chinese to whom we had an introduction we spoke about our business, and he promptly told us that there was here in Macao a Japanese who wanted to return to his native country. In answer to our request his little boy went in search of the Japanese.
    What am I to say about this man, this first Japanese I ever met in my life? Reeling from excess of alcohol, a drunken man staggered into the room. About twenty-eight or nine years of age, he was dressed in rags. His name was Kichijirō. When finally he answered our questions we learned that he was a fisherman from the district of Hizen near Nagasaki. Before the famous Shimabara insurrection he had been adrift on the sea and had been picked up by a Portuguese ship. Whether or not it was due to his drunkenness I do not know, but there was a crafty look on his face, and as he spoke he would roll his eyes.
    ‘Are you a Christian?’ The question came from Garrpe. But the fellow suddenly shut up like a clam. We could not understand why Garrpe’s question should make him so unhappy. At first he did not want to talk at all; but at length, yielding to our entreaties, he began bit by bit to tell the story of the Christian persecution in Kyushu. And here it is. In the village of Kurasaki in Hizen he had witnessed the spectacle of twenty-four Christians being subjected to the water punishment by the local daimyo. Wooden stakes were fixed in the sea at the water’s edge and the Christians were bound to them. When the tide came in, the water would reach up to a certain mark, and then recede. The Christians gradually became utterly exhausted and after about a week they died in the most terrible agony. Did even Nero of