The Grace to Go on Living: The Dialectics of Everyday Life and Christian Japanization in Endō Shūsaku’s Silence

This study reinterprets Father Rodrigues’s apostasy in Endō Shūsaku’s Silence not as a religious failure, but as a process of Christianity’s “Japanization,” analyzed within the context of postwar Japanese intellectual history. Where existing criticism often falls into the binary opposition between martyrdom and betrayal, this study introduces the perspective of individual conviction versus organizational authority. First, Rodrigues’s act resonates with Yoshimoto Takaaki’s tenkō (ideological conversion) theory, specifically defined as the “third form of tenkō.” This form represents the choice to pursue the integrity of personal conviction over obedience to an organization. This links Rodrigues’s action to the spiritual continuity of the Kakure Kirishitan (Hidden Christians), arguing that the essence of his apostasy is a betrayal of the Church institution, not of faith itself. Furthermore, through the theme of the dialectic of everyday life, the study demonstrates that salvation is discovered not in the glorious death of martyrdom, but within the secular fabric of daily existence. Rodrigues’s paradoxical condition of being both weak and strong as Okada San’emon after the fumie is an extension of the Kakure Kirishitan’s survival, who maintained their faith amid secular labor. In conclusion, Endō’s literature serves as a testimony for the “cowards” and a plea for the grace to go on living. It illuminates the process through which individual faith transcends institutional authority and takes root in the indigenous Japanese way of life, thereby completing the vision of Christianity’s “Japanization.”