The Japan Society Review 67
Book, Stage, Film, Arts and Events Review

Issue 67 Volume 12 Number 1 (February 2017)

This first issue of The Japan Society Review in 2017 covers
a wide range of topics and media, from history to humourand origami, from academic books to popular films, aiming
to bring you some of the latest Japan-related publications
and events in the UK.
The monograph by Dr Gordon Daniels offers acomprehensive study of one particular episode of theAnglo-Japanese history, the Japanese Red Cross Mission
to Britain during the First World War. As our reviewer Gill
Goddard points out, the story of those Japanese nurses
and doctors at the Red Cross Hospital at Netley highlights
Japan’s contribution to military nursing and medicine
in the early decades of the 20th century as well as thenation’s political position at the time.
The recent re-edition of Womansword: What
Japanese Words Say about Women by Kittredge Cherry
not only marks the 30th anniversary of its original
publication, but also provides reviewer Charlotte Goff,and our readers, the opportunity of reflecting on how theJapanese language expresses womanhood. Focusing on
the socio-historical role of laughter and foolery in Japanand their connections with Japanese folklore, mythology
and religion, Holy Foolery in the Life of Japan, reviewed
by Sir Hugh Cortazzi, complicates the often baselessstereotype that the Japanese do not have a sense of
humour. As its titles indicates, Origami for Mindfulness by
Mari Ono, reviewed by Margaret Russo, presents the art craftof origami from a therapeutic perspective, offering step-bystep instructions to create beautiful paper figures as a useful
way of releasing stress and concentrating the mind.
Finally, our last reviews of this issue are dedicatedto two celebrated films recently released in the UK. The
animated film Your name directed by Shinkai Makoto
has been a great success within and beyond Japan andour reviewer Poppy Cosyns confirms the beauty of its
animation and the appeal of its coming-of-age story. On
a very different topic, Roger Macy reviews Silence, Martin
Scorsese’s adaptation of the homonymous novel by
Shusaku Endo, which depicts the violent eradication of
Christianity in the early Tokugawa period.
Alejandra Armendariz-Hernandez

Contents
1)

The Japanese Red Cross at Netley, 1915-1916 by Gordon
Daniels

Editor2)

Womansword: What Japanese Words Say about Women
by Kittredge Cherry

Reviewers

3)

Holy Foolery in the Life of Japan by Higuchi Kazunori

4)

Origami for Mindfulness by Mari Ono

5)Your Name directed by Shinkai Makoto

6)

Silence directed by Martin Scorsese

Alejandra Armendariz-Hernandez
Gill Goddard, Charlotte Goff, Sir Hugh Cortazzi, Margaret Russo, Poppy
Cosyns and Roger Macy
(Photo: Kerry Brown)

The Japanese Red Cross at
Netley, 1915-1916
by Gordon Daniels
Hampshire Field Club &Archaeological Society (2016)
ISBN-13: 978-0-907473-16-9
Review by Gill Goddard
In this piece of detailed research, Dr Daniels hasbrought into focus the role of the Japanese Red Cross
Relief Mission to Britain during the 1914-1918 war. For
most of 1915, a team of highly qualified nurses anddoctors brought their expertise in caring for battlefieldcasualties to the newly built Red Cross Hospital at
Netley, near Southampton in Hampshire. The medical
and nursing work of this early foreign medical
assistance to Britain was much appreciated at the time
as many British medical staff had already gone overseas
to work at the frontline, while replacement volunteers
often lacked the necessary training and expertise.
Using a variety of both Japanese and British
resources, Dr Daniels examines the background to
the sending of a detachment of Japanese Red Cross
personnel half way round the world, and throughexamination of previously untranslated material has
illuminated further the motivation of the Japanese
government, and the detailed briefings given to thegroup in preparation for their departure. Newspaper
coverage shows that on the journey to Britain via Hawaii

Womansword: What
Japanese Words Say
about Women
by Kittredge Cherry
Stone Bridge Press
30th Anniversary edition (2016)
ISBN-10: 161172029X
Review by Charlotte Goff
Three decades after its original
publication, Womansword: What Japanese Words Say
about Women remains a rare resource for Japaneselearners and those who wish better to understandhow the Japanese language expresses womanhood.
Kittredge Cherry, who describes arriving in Narita in
1982, ‘a young American woman eager to conquer
Japanese language and Japanese sexism, notnecessarily in that order’, spent five years speaking to2

and across America the US Japanese community gavethem a great reception, and that Hampshire society
also was generous in its welcome to the party of 20
female nurses, two male doctors, an interpreter and an
administrator.
Additionally, the story of the origins andformation of the Japanese Red Cross itself is covered
in some detail, giving the reader an insight into thedevelopment of military medical expertise in Japanand its ready availability to assist its allies in time ofneed. That all of the expense of the mission to Britain
and the sister missions to Russia and to France wasborne by Japan is rightly not overlooked.
As the British media continues its fascination
with the 1914-1918 war, the timely publicationof this interesting monograph focuses on Japan’scontribution not on the battlefield but in thehumanitarian field of military nursing and medicine.
As Dr Daniels points out, this aspect of the Japanese
government’s interpretation of the Anglo-Japanese
Alliance gave their country honour and indeed facein a world still politically dominated by the Western
powers.§The Japanese Red Cross at Netley is available to
Japan Society members for the discounted price of £8
including postage and packing (usually £10). Orders
with cheques payable to “Hampshire Field Club”
should be sent to Julia Sandison at 22 Clifton Road,
Winchester SO22 5BP.

Japanese women, collating and interpreting Japanesewords and arranging them in categories such as
female identity, motherhood and sexuality. The result
was Womansword, a collection of definitions andshort essays and above all a distillation of cross-culturalconversations about being a woman.
I had misgivings about the premise of a book inwhich a non-Japanese person claims to explain what
Japanese words say about Japanese women, and byextension about my role as a non-Japanese reviewerof that book. Couldn’t both roles be done better bya Japanese woman with the native Japanese required
fully to understand the words’ nuance and context,
and the experience of being a woman in Japan, ofusing these words and having them used about her?
Kittredge Cherry, it seems, had the same misgivings. In
the preface to the original edition of her now classic
published in 1987, she wrote that it was the enthusiasmof Japanese women themselves which pushed her
Issue 67, Volume 12, Number 1 (February 2017)

to publish despite her main reservation: ‘Shouldn’t
Japanese women, like all people, be speaking forthemselves?’
Cherry’s reservations about speaking forJapanese women were assuaged, but the fact that she
had them helped make what could easily have beena glib, outside perspective of Japanese exceptionality(what might now fall under the ‘weird Japan’ subgenre of Japan-related media) into something moremeaningful. Rather than speaking for, or over, Japanesewomen, Cherry’s work is the product of forging
connections with and listening to Japanese women. It
is easy to see why these women enjoyed speaking to
Cherry, in some cases even helping her research boththe original and its re-edition three decades later. Her
sense of humour is clear, as is her kindness towards thelanguage and culture she describes. She is careful, in
most cases, not to import foreign value judgements ininterpreting the Japanese words she presents, and thevalue of her work lies in its refusal to accept easy, dated
stereotypes of Japanese women. The title itself is awelcome rejection of the popular western stereotype
which sees Japanese women as submissive and weak:
Cherry coined ‘womansword’ to denote both thestrength of Japanese women, wielding swords since
the seventeenth century and still now dominating
naginata sword-play, as well as the words used about
women.
The beauty of Womansword is that, whilst it
focuses on Japanese language and women, it forcesthe English-speaking reader to remember the biases
which exist in their own language, too. I was struckby the number of these Japanese words which haveequivalent English terms or concepts. For the Japaneseword ‘kizumono’ we might talk of ‘damaged goods’,
and whilst Japanese women who don’t marry before
the age of twenty-five might once have been called‘Christmas cakes’, in English we share the metaphor toa certain extent: women being ‘left on the shelf’ likeunwanted food, a fate eschewed by men. In the sameway, we might not talk about the ‘daughters-in-abox’ that Cherry describes, but we do speak of ‘trophy
wives’, similarly imagined as objects for presentationand preservation by men; although we don’t usuallylabel our mothers dinosaurs or ‘mamagon’, we dohave a word for the female fiancé when she crosses
our threshold of acceptable female assertiveness:‘bridezilla’. The fact that Cherry was able to explainthese terms in English is in itself testament that manyof these concepts are shared, used in both languages.
Reading this latest re-edition of Cherry’s classic,
it is difficult not to feel frustrated that there is no
guarantee that the collected words and concepts
continue to be current in 2017. The new preface,which introduces contemporary Japanese ‘woman’s
words’ such as ‘sci-girl’ and ‘womenomics’, as well as
describing the social and linguistic changes whichhave taken place between publication of the original
and its thirtieth edition, has the almost inevitablecorollary of highlighting how outdated some of theoriginal words and concepts are, decades later. Cherry
provided readers with a snapshot of how Japanese
language reflects attitudes towards womanhood,but it is important to remember that some Japanesewomen at the time and Japanese women in the future
are excluded from this frame.§

Holy Foolery in the Life of Japanauthor of this thoughtprovoking analysis of therole of laughter in Japan.
Foreigners who only
meet a few officials andbusiness
executives,inwhom the importance ofserious (majime) attitudes
has been inculcated inschool and university, foster
the idea that the Japanese
have no sense of humour.
This impression is reinforced by the lack of a simple
Japanese term for sense of humour other than ‘umoru
no sensu’. (Once when years ago I was giving a speechin Sapporo and referring in Japanese to this problem

by Higuchi Kazunoritranslated by Waku Miller
LTCB International Library Trust/International Houseof Japan (2015)
ISBN-13: 978-4-924971-40-0
Review by Sir Hugh Cortazzi‘Before the modern era, people in Japan and in othernations tolerated and even welcomed foolery in their
heroes. Modernization, at least in Japan, ushered in a
preoccupation in schools and in the workplace withseriousness and diligence. Japanese society lost its
tolerance for silliness. People came to regard foolery
as socially useless, as mere frivolity’. So declares theLatest reviews: www.japansociety.org.uk/resources/reviews/

3

one old gentleman misheard me and asked what I
meant by ‘umoru no senso’, senso meaning war!).
In fact as Higuchi points out laughter and fun haveplayed a significant role in Japanese mythology andfolklore since the earliest times. The kanji for laughter,
笑い (warai), apparently ‘evolved from an ideographic
representation of a shrine maiden extending her arms
upward while dancing’. He notes that the sun goddess
Amaterasu-omikami who had hidden herself in a cavebecause of havoc caused by her brother Susa-no-o
was only enticed to emerge when Ame-no-uzume
caused peals of laughter by dancing wildly tearing off
her clothes and exposing her breasts ‘and even her
genitalia’.
Foolery and laughter, as Higuchi points out,
have been important elements in Shinto mythology
ever since. He quotes many examples from Japanesefolklore drawing on the writings of scholars such as
Yanagita Kunio and the eccentric Minakata Kumagusu,
who was the subject of a biographical portrait byCarmen Blacker (Britain and Japan; BiographicalPortraits, volume I, ed. Ian Nish, Japan Library, 1994).
In Japan as in Europe ‘great’ men needed to
be kept amused and had their ‘fools’ or jesters. Oneof the most famous of these was Sorori Shinzaemon
who served the ‘ruthless warlord’ Toyotomi Hideyoshi(1537-1598). Hideyoshi had an ‘inferiority complex
about his appearance’ and confessed to Shinzaemon
that he thought he looked like a monkey. Shinzaemon
responded ‘No. Sire. So in awe of your greatness are
the monkeys that they distort their faces to look likeyour Highness’s’. Shinzaemon escaped punishment.

Japanese serious and stately noh dramas werelightened by short comic playlets or kyōgen. These
often depicted ‘scams and hoaxes’ and servants
getting their own back on their masters. In Japan as inother cultures laughter is often roused by lampooning
the pompous and the overbearing.
Unfortunately humour of this kind can also be
cruel. It is easy to make a fool of the ‘village idiot’ who
may have been born mentally deficient or crippled.
But laughter can also, as Higuchi points out, play a rolein lightening the horrific effects of natural disasters, towhich Japan is sadly so prone. Laughter can be seen insuch circumstances ‘as an expression of relief and as asign of safety’.
Higuchi’s book is not and does not claim to be ahistory of Japanese humour. He does include Hokusai
and his manga, but it does not cover senryu (haikulength witty verses) or comic novels of the Edo period.
Nor does it discuss modern comic manga and strip
cartoons. And there is nothing about modern writersof comic stories such as Genji Keita whose ‘salaryman’stories I used to translate. But a book covering all these
aspects of Japanese humour would be a hefty tome.
I feared when I began reading Higuchi’s bookthat he might put too much effort into analysing thepsychology of laughter and defining the meaningof humour in ways that deaden any sense of fun.
But while there were interesting lessons in folklore,
religion and history in his book I realised that he did
not want his readers to approach his subject in too
majime a way. Many of his examples are amusing aswell as informative.§

Origami for
Mindfulness

communication. We are bombarded with information
24/7. We have not evolved as a species to cope withlife as it is today. Consequently, apart from stress, weare in turn, angry and tired, and this has led to an
unprecedented increase in anxiety and depression
across all age groups. So how do we bring ourselves
back into balance?
Mindfulness has come into popular culture in
recent years but it is a concept which is centuries old.
Being mindful is being present – completely present –in the given moment. When you are mindful, you arefocused and when you are focused, your mind cannot
wander into the past or the future where you haveno control. I practice mindfulness, but being humanwith flaws and frailties, I falter at times. I was therefore
delighted to come across Mari Ono’s Origami for
Mindfulness.

by Mari Ono
CICO Books (2016)
ISBN-13: 9781782494058
Review by Margaret
Russo
I don’t believe that anyone could disagree with thestatement that we live busy lives today which canbe often stressful. We pack in activities and scheduleourselves to the point that spontaneity or the sheer
pleasure of ‘doing nothing’ is a lost art. Technology,
meant to make our lives easier, has had the opposite
effect. We rely on our phones and tablets forentertainment, information, and yes, once in a while,
4

Issue 67, Volume 12, Number 1 (February 2017)‘Colour and fold your way to inner peace’Speaking as an admirer of all things Japanese, I foundMari’s beautiful book a joy for the senses. It is visuallyexquisite and in opening it to the first pages, you knowthat you are in for a treat. She discusses the history
behind origami and, uniquely, spells out why origami
is therapeutic. It releases stress, it relaxes. It requires
focus, and Mari goes so far as to suggest it can evenhave an anti-ageing effect! What origami certainly
does is feed our creative juices and with that, brings
us joy.

The book comes with origami papers, some ofwhich are to be coloured in. Again, the very act ofcolouring is calming as it requires concentration. The
popularity of adult colouring books on the market
today speaks for itself. The book is divided into
chapters entitled ‘Love and Hope’, ‘Happiness andLaughter’ (a particular favourite of mine) and ‘Belief andWillingness’. Within each chapter you will find a variety
of projects with a difficulty rating of one to three stars.
The individual projects are well illustrated with stepby-step instructions. I confess to being a complete
origami novice. I opened the book to its first chapter
and found the Fusenbako Balloon Box with an ‘easy’rating. After several minutes, I was left with a piece of
paper with a million folds but no box. Determined,
and keeping with the box theme, I next selected theKobako Chocolate Box. Not easy, but a success! I have
my lovely little Kobako (without chocolate) box next tome as I write, and I couldn’t be more pleased.
Like so many things in life, origami is a craft tobe practiced and perfected over a period of time. It
requires complete focus and attention. The joy ofcreating something beautiful out of a piece of paper isimmeasurable. Is this one antidote to our hectic lives?
Yes it is. And I do feel calmer.§Your Name
directed by Shinkai Makoto
Released 24 November 2016
Review by Poppy Cosyns
Since anime titan Miyazaki Hayao formally announced
his retirement back in 2013, there has been a collective
anxiety over who might prove a worthy successor. After
his reluctant heir Miyazaki Goro failed to make much of
an impact with 2011’s gentle From Up On Poppy Hill,
anime fans have started to look beyond the aegis ofStudio Ghibli to find one. And so enter Shinkai Makoto.
He began his career as a graphic designer, before
realising his dream of writing and directing animationsin the early ’00s. His fifth feature, Your Name is now
Japan’s third highest grossing domestic film of all time,
sandwiched between Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle
and Princess Mononoke.
It tells the story of teenagers Mitsuha and Taki,
who have the humdrum of their daily lives disrupted
when they mysteriously start swapping bodies. First
Latest reviews: www.japansociety.org.uk/resources/reviews/

we see Tokyoite Taki go through the disorientating
experience of living a day in the body of a stranger –waking up astonished to find that he has breasts (arecurring joke in the film) before shambling throughMitsuha’s school day in the rural, conservative town of
Itomori. Mitsuha then, is equally overwhelmed whenforced to negotiate Taki’s macho schoolmates andchaotic part-time job as a waiter. The pair swap backand forth at random and once returned to their original
5

bodies leave each other instructional text messages asa means of damage limitation.
The first half of the film perfectly captures thegiddiness and absurdity of adolescence, Shinkai
using the body-swapping plot device to explore thetransformation and lack of control that define thatawkward stage between childhood and adulthood.
In the second half, the tone darkens as Itomori (afictional town loosely based on Shinkai’s birthplace) isthreatened by natural disaster, leading Taki to embark
on a time-hopping adventure to save the town – and,moreover, the girl – to whom his life is now irrevocably

tied. Aside from its fast-paced plot and sensitive
portrayal of the teenage psyche, the film also excels
visually, its epic vistas bringing to mind the fantasticallandscapes of English romantic painter John Martin.
Whether depicting the verdant fields and star-filled
skies of Itomori or the power-line strewn labyrinthsof residential Tokyo, each scene has been beautifully
executed. Like Miyazaki, Shinkai possesses an attention
to detail that can elevate a piece of work to greatness
and there is little in this film’s content or presentationthat hasn’t been finished with meticulous care.§

Silence
directed by Martin Scorsese
Released 1 January 2017
Review by Roger Macy
The missionary, Martin Scorsese, is an apostate. He
had promised us, in a votive epilogue to the recent
academic volume Approaching Silence (Mark Darren
and Darren J. N. Middleton eds., 2015), to let us
understand what cannot be shown. He even invoked
the Eisenstein principle of montage and ‘third meaning’
as a tool of God to be employed to understand His
meaning (Scorsese’s punctuation, not mine). However,what we finally got after two-and-a-half hours – and,be warned, we head straight to the spoiler, here – wassomething mundanely shown, without montage, in
our plain view; that thing destroyed without possibilityof transmission, which had lain hidden from all but his
closest family whilst he spent his career as an effective
persecutor of the tangible and intangible assets ofthe church in Japan. Scorsese is hardly an untalented
filmmaker, and this little thing had, I grant, been
seen to be hidden in an earlier episode, subtly, in an
unsubtle place – much closer to where Allied P.O.W.s
hid something precious. But it’s unlikely that Scorsese
was thinking of that. Let me paint a broader context.
Scorsese has adapted the famous novel of Endo
Shusaku. The novel is set mainly around the 1630s at
a time when the violent eradication of Christianity inthe early Tokugawa era was mainly achieved, apartfrom isolated villages in the far west. Two firebrandJesuit priests are landed clandestinely to make contact
with any remaining faithful and discover the truth of
the rumoured apostasy of their own mentor. By doing
so, they bring the remaining flocks into mortal danger
6and diabolical temptation to betray, and not just by
thirty pieces of silver.
The first half of the book comprises letters backof one of these priests, Rodrigues, to his mission
headquarters in Macao. Most of the second half, after
the priest’s capture, takes the form of a narrative of the
torture of the faithful. This novelised, supra-humannarrative, nevertheless, reports the arguments within
the mind of Rodrigues in a much more internalised,
naked, form than his reports to head office had
previously revealed. Spoiler alert, again – he does
apostatize and, after that, there is a short section of
supposed reports of surveillance of his house arrest
from his spy-masters to their head office in the bakufu.
If, reader, you think I’ve given much away, I
can reasonably deduce that you are not a reader ofthe novel, nor of any of the academic essays on thenature of that apostasy, the most recent collection I
mentioned at the beginning. The contested meaningof this apostasy lays bare the considerable difficulty inportraying the book on film.
Scorsese’s is not the first adaptation of Endo’s
novel. Less than five years after its first publication,
the director Shinoda Masahiro made his version
in 1971, which is available in an English-subtitledIssue 67, Volume 12, Number 1 (February 2017)

DVD. Mark Williams, the author of the Englishlanguage monograph on Endo, Endo Shusaku: A
Literature of Reconciliation (1999), writes of Endo’s“well-documented disappointment” at the only film
version in his lifetime, in the way it depicts Rodrigues’“abandonment of a silent God”. Williams is an
assiduous scholar but there is a conspicuous absenceof any reference to support “well-documented”.
That disappointment is, indeed, universally attested,
but Endo would have had a problem documenting
his objection since he is not only credited with theoriginal story but also its adaptation. It’s not hard tosee what he disliked. Shinoda’s film has Rodrigues
making, finally the required gesture of renunciation –the stepping upon the image of Christ, the fumie. All
that happens afterwards in that film is that Rodrigues
is assigned a young widow to marry, and Shinoda
closes with Rodrigues ravishing his acquired wife withgusto. That wife was played by Shinoda’s wife, Iwashita
Shima, and this scene just happens to generate the stillthat was used for the poster in Japan. So, in a painful
double irony, Endo found himself credited with a total
repudiation that he then spent a lifetime attempting
to reverse.
The appeal of Endo’s novel to the left in Japan
had much to do with the parallels that could be easily
taken with the phenomenon of tenko - the required
renunciation of views that was required of dissentersby the militarist authorities during the ‘dark valley’ of
totalitarian rule up to 1945. It’s not difficult to discern
this as the appeal of the story to the leftist Shinoda, butwhether he appreciated the irony of inducing a careerof reverse-tenko for the original author, I cannot say.
Endo’s quest to re-narrate the perceived endingof Silence can even be seen in his rare appearance
on British television. Should readers not immediately
recall Endo’s ownership of the Bookmark programmeon BBC2 on 13 April 1988, it is now easily viewable in
the British Library Reading Rooms. After Endo speaks tocamera on various topics, he chooses to read from thisvery novel, and specifically from the internal dialogueof the narration leading up to Rodrigues’ apostasy.
This characterises his tenko as an act of love for theJapanese who are being persecuted for his faith; andan act of humility in accepting that it is not for him
to re-enact Christ’s own sacrifice, the defining act of
the Trinitarian church. Rodrigues, in his narrated mind,
steers himself into a lesser sacramentalism and love of
God through his own imaging of the face and voice ofJesus. My problem with Endo’s supposed correction of
the record is that his reading omits the remarks in theLatest reviews: www.japansociety.org.uk/resources/reviews/

novel immediately before and after this section – which
see this view as a self-serving justification. These doubts
about the doubts originate from his grand inquisitor
Inoue, who had every reason to want Rodrigues tohold to this renunciation. It seems to me that theoriginal novel explored doubt more fundamentallythan Endo seems to have later maintained, and much
more than Scorsese wishes to depict. Neither of thesemen had, or has, any ‘Chinese wall’ from their authority
on Earth, the One catholic and apostolic church. Soon
after the original publication of the novel, the bishop of
Nagasaki told his flock from the pulpit that they should
not read this novel. Endo was eventually successful ingetting the church to soften its position. Scorsese’s
attention was initially prompted by the Episcopalianarchbishop of New York, but I firmly believe that
Scorsese’s project operates within the grace of the
Roman Catholic church. This unbeliever also believes
that Endo’s confidence in Scorsese stemmed from awish to repudiate his own doubt.
So, the apostasy of which I accuse Scorsese iscinematic and definitely not doctrinal or sacramental.
If Scorsese has steered
Endo’s novel into safer
waters, he has certainly
read the novel. For
example, at the momentof Rodrigues’ stamping
on the fumie, Shinoda
cuts to a momentarily
disappointed
Ferreira,
his Jesuit predecessor inapostasy. For Scorsese,that
disappointment
is on the face of Inouehimself (whom the novel
reveals to be an even
earlier apostate).
Scorsese’s coda depicts Rodrigues and Ferreirain a busy public life of persecuting the Faith, whilst
one, at least, of them secretly holds to the faith. Butthat does not begin to convey Endo’s coda. Endo’s
atogaki, or postscript, is in the form of a ‘diary’ by asecret policeman of the bakufu. This has Rodrigues,
now with a Japanese name and family, under close
house arrest and under pressure to produce further
testimonies against the Faith. Mark Williams, in his
essay in Approaching Silence, points out that this‘diary’ is based on a real historical manuscript, theYoroku, which Endo fundamentally altered to amplify
Rodrigues further wavering and doubt. We get none of7this in either film version. The ‘diary’ makes some key
references to another character in the novel, Kichijiro,
a vacillating figure who makes more apostasies thanmost of his fellow-villagers had hot breakfasts. Endo
clearly invokes the imagery of Judas in this characterand both filmmakers pick up on this. But the ‘diary’ inthe novel has Kichijiro re-entering the life of a closed
Catholic family, in a way that I could imagine reading ina secret policeman’s report from Elizabethan England.
Who better to make doubt eternal than the figure ofKichijiro?
This brings me to a brief consideration of actors.
A sizeable proportion of the preview audience saw
Kichijiro’s continual repentances as a comic turnand laughed considerably. They also laughed at thecharacter of Inoue. This is nothing short of disastrous.
The protagonist, Rodrigues, must, according to Endo’s
syuzhet, see Kichijiro’s path as the wiser. Inoue, on
the other hand, is an informed manipulator, highly
empathetic in a thoroughly malign way. Both weredepicted by Japanese actors of considerable fame,working outside their native tongue. The inquisitor inchief, Inoue, is played by Ogata Issei, whose comic styleof acting is here taken even further than normal in an
eccentrically accented English. To my mind, the two
actors who acquit themselves well are Adam Driverand Tsukamoto Shinya but alas, both their charactershave died humbly for their faith before the crux.
Casting problems lead us to the general problemof language. Endo’s novel is, of course, in Japanese,apart from a handful of Latin phrases. The reader
knows from the beginning that it starts as an accountby a Portuguese priest to his superiors in Macao,
but translation is rarely visible, it is merely implied orelided over with just a few references to a character
becoming versed in Japanese. Later, in the novel-form
narration of the interrogation, another character steps
in as translator for Inoue.
As soon as this story is portrayed on screen, someproblems will not go away. The missionary priests comefrom a racial otherness, which marks them as different
from the faithful they serve as priests. Casting blind
to racial difference would create a comprehension
barrier to appreciating the historical setting, andfew have attempted it. Shinoda and Scorsese, as you
would expect, have Western actors play the priests
and Japanese actors play all the other speaking
parts. Shinoda’s film was only pitched at a Japaneseaudience. His two ‘foreign’ actors playing the two
priests are given a superficial credibility of foreignnessby speaking some non-Japanese, but it’s certainly

not Portuguese and it’s not always recognisable asEnglish. Alas, the UK DVD doesn’t subtitle the Westerndialogue which sometimes escaped me. It made it
painfully obvious that the director of these actors did
not understand the dialogue they were attempting.
Given that experience, I tried hard to find a native
Japanese-speaker to hear the Scorsese film with me,
but this could not be, so I can only report as an Englishspeaker.
Scorsese’s film has its own conventions about
speaking ‘foreign’, which pretty much follow the
Hollywood norm. The non-foreign that the three
Hollywood stars speak is never Portuguese, but aneutral American-accented English. Perhaps an hour
into the film, there is a reference in the dialogue to
speaking, or not speaking Portuguese, but the story
is written as a setting specifically of the Englishtranslated, and hence English-spoken novel. In theusual novel narration, it is the understanding of thereader that is the ‘home’ language and the actual formof the language spoken can be left unsaid. But, in thefilm, with language difference being such a crucial
element of the story, and of the original encounter, andwith known Japanese actors, set in Japan, before myeyes, I found it hard to overlook language differencein the long passages where I was effectively asked to
do so. In particular, Inoue, and his actor, Ogata Issei,
should never have been allowed to speak English.
I guess the Hollywood money wouldn’t permit anyother language but English for the showdown.
These criticisms perhaps do not give sufficientcredit for how Scorsese has depicted the past as
a foreign country. It would have been very easy
to make 17th century Japan doubly alienated andScorsese largely avoids unnecessary exoticism whilst
convincingly portraying the landing on an unknown
shore. He also controls the darkness better thanShinoda, whose filming of the clandestine movementsof the villagers was more ambitious than his film stock
could always depict. But one thing that particularlymarked Shinoda’s film as avant-garde was the music.
Doug Cummings, in the Masters of Cinema DVD
booklet, writes of “atonal sounds”, but it’s much morejarring than that. Two developed but completely
different tuning systems from East and West play theircompeting scores, which never reconcile or resolve.
Takemitsu Toru seemed to relish taking up a constanttheme of Endo, who saw two opposed cultures which,in his opinion, could not be planted in the other’s soil.
In contrast with that, I confess to not noticing music in
Scorsese’s film, except over the end credits.§