I LOVE JAPAN. Kazuhiro Arai

Shusaku Endo’s Silence and Christianity (1)               Many people may think that Shusaku Endo’s Silence is a masterpiece and especially Western Christians may enjoy reading it and watching the movie. I would like to claim however that it is a poor work with an ingrained bias of the Christian. The author has spread a barbarous image of Japanese people throughout the world. This is a completely wrong image. First I would like to provide you with information that the author lived a few hundred meters away from my present home. The first photo below shows his residential area. From this you may obtain a bit of image of where he wrote Silence . He used to walk around this neighborhood. So do I sometimes but I have never met him because he had died before I moved in. His close redactor lived nearby.               A key point for fair evaluation of Silence is to know that Christianity had been banned in Japan for a long time before missionary Giuseppe Chiara, the model of hero

What USA did to Japan               As I wrote before, USA instigated Japan to start the Japan-US war through several economic sanctions including the oil embargoes in 1940 and 1941, which could be considered a virtual war declaration on Japan at that time. It was aware of the Pearl Harbor attack beforehand by listening in to the communications of the Japanese Navy. This was why aircraft carriers Enterprise and Lexington and newly built escort vessels were not at the harbor and only old warships were moored there. In spite of these facts, USA insisted that Japan had carried out a sneaky attack. There are many wars including the Vietnam War that were started without a declaration.               USA dropped countless incendiary bombs over Tokyo on the 10 th of March 1941 and killed more than a hundred thousand civilians. It dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and killed a few hundred thousand civilians. These were serious violation of international law.