Fujimura Silence and Beauty

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8308-9435-2
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 263 Seiten

Logos Bookstore Association Award Dallas Willard Center Book Award Finalist Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Finalist World Magazine's Best Books Aldersgate Prize by the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University ECPA Top Shelf Book Cover Award Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year Missio Alliance Essential Reading List Shusaku Endo's novel Silence, first published in 1966, endures as one of the greatest works of twentieth-century Japanese literature. Its narrative of the persecution of Christians in seventeenth-century Japan raises uncomfortable questions about God and the ambiguity of faith in the midst of suffering and hostility. Endo's Silence took internationally renowned visual artist Makoto Fujimura on a pilgrimage of grappling with the nature of art, the significance of pain and his own cultural heritage. His artistic faith journey overlaps with Endo's as he uncovers deep layers of meaning in Japanese history and literature, expressed in art both past and present. He finds connections to how faith is lived in contemporary contexts of trauma and glimpses of how the gospel is conveyed in Christ-hidden cultures. In this world of pain and suffering, God often seems silent. Fujimura's reflections show that light is yet present in darkness, and that silence speaks with hidden beauty and truth.

Makoto Fujimura is an internationally recognized contemporary artist whose work appears in major museums and galleries around the world. He is also an award-winning author of five books, including Art Is: A Journey Into the Light and Art+Faith: A Theology of Making. He is the founder of IAMCultureCare and the Fujimura Institute. Fujimura served on the National Council on the Arts as a presidential appointee and he is a celebrated speaker and advocate for the arts.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fujimura, Makoto

Leseproben

Foreword

Philip Yancey

Christian martyrs regularly make the news. From places like Nigeria, Iraq and Syria, the media report on believers persecuted and killed by the Islamic State and other radical groups. And who can forget the scene of orange-clad Egyptian Christians kneeling by the Libyan surf, mouthing prayers, just before jihadists slash their heads from their bodies. All these join a host of martyrs from the twentieth century, which produced more martyrs than all previous centuries combined.

“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” wrote the early church father Tertullian, and indeed in many places persecution gave rise to times of remarkable growth. But what of those who recant? In Rome, in Nazi Germany, in Stalinist Russia and Maoist China, some pastors and ordinary believers either publicly renounced their deepest beliefs or stayed silent. Who tells their stories?

In Japan the blood of the martyrs led to the near annihilation of the church. Francis Xavier, one of the seven original Jesuits, landed there in 1549 and planted a church that within a generation had swelled to 300,000 members. Xavier called Japan “the country in the Orient most suited to Christianity.” Before long, however, the Japanese warlords grew wary of foreign influence. They decided to expel the Jesuits and require that all Christians repudiate their faith and register as Buddhists. To dramatize the change in policy, in 1597 they arrested twenty-six Christians—six foreign missionaries and twenty Japanese Christians, including three young boys—mutilated their ears and noses, and force-marched them some five hundred miles. Upon arrival in Nagasaki, the focal point of Japan’s Christian community, the prisoners were led to a hill, crucified and pierced with spears. The era of persecution had begun, on what became known as Martyrs Hill.

Japanese culture deemed suicide an honorable act, and rulers feared that too many martyrs might enhance the church’s reputation and spread its influence. Instead, in a society that values loyalty and “saving face,” the warlords gave priority to making the Christians renounce their faith in a public display. They must trample on the fumi-e, a bronze portrait of Jesus or Mary mounted on a wooden frame, and thus deface their most revered symbols. Not just once, they had to step on the fumi-e every New Year’s Day in order to prove they had decisively left the outlawed religion.

The Japanese who stepped on the fumi-e were pronounced apostate Christians and set free. Those who refused, the magistrates hunted down and killed. Some were tied to stakes in the sea to await high tides that would slowly drown them, while others were bound and tossed off rafts; some were scalded in boiling hot springs, and still others were hung upside down over a pit full of dead bodies and excrement.

Mako Fujimura writes of standing on Martyrs Hill, a mile from Nagasaki’s Ground Zero. In one of history’s cruel ironies, the second atomic bomb exploded directly above Japan’s largest congregation of Christians, many of whom had gathered for mass at the cathedral. (Clouds obscured the intended city, forcing the bombing crew to select an alternate target.) In the end, more Christians died in the atomic destruction of Nagasaki than in the centuries of persecution that followed the deaths of the twenty-six martyrs in 1597, for over the years by far the majority of believers had apostatized.

In the 1950s a young writer named Shusaku Endo visited a nearby museum to begin research on his next novel, which he planned to set in the devastation of postwar Nagasaki. He stood gazing at one particular glass case, which displayed a fumi-e from the seventeenth century. Blackened marks on the wooden frame surrounding the bronze portrait of Mary and Jesus, itself worn smooth, gave haunting evidence of the thousands of Christians who had betrayed their Lord by stepping on it.

The fumi-e obsessed Endo. Would I have stepped on it? he wondered. What did those people feel as they apostatized? Who were they? History books at his Catholic school recorded only the brave, glorious martyrs, not the cowards who forsook the faith. The traitors were twice damned: first by the silence of God at the time of torture and later by the silence of history. Instead of writing his intended novel, Endo began work on Silence, which tells the story of the apostates of the seventeenth century.

Shusaku Endo went on to become Japan’s best-known writer, his name making the short list for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Graham Greene called him “one of the finest living novelists,” and luminaries like John Updike joined the chorus of praise. Remarkably, in a nation where Christians comprise less than 1 percent of the population, Endo’s major books, all centering on Christian themes, landed on Japan’s bestseller lists. Now a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese will bring Silence, his most powerful story, to a worldwide audience.

Bicultural in upbringing and sensibility, Mako Fujimura understands the nuances of Japan, and his knowledge of the language sheds light on Endo’s original source material. At the same time, Mako’s years of living in New York have given him a contemporary, global perspective. On that visit to Nagasaki, he could not help reliving another Ground Zero experience, for on September 11, 2001, Mako was working in his studio a few blocks from the World Trade Center. And on the very day he stood on Martyrs Hill, news outlets were featuring photos of two Japanese journalists kneeling before sword-wielding jihadists, shortly before their executions. One of the two, Kenji Goto, was an outspoken Christian. Though the perpetrators may change, the age of religious martyrdom endures.

Informed by both East and West, Mako guides the reader on excursions into Japanese art, samurai rituals, the tea ceremony and Asian theology, even while relying on Western mentors such as Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, J. S. Bach, Vincent van Gogh and J. R. R. Tolkien. Much like Shusaku Endo, Mako feels caught between two worlds, conversant with both, though not fully at home in either.

In Silence and Beauty, Mako is not so much presenting a thesis as he is following the strands of Endo’s writing that intimately engage him. From his experience as an academic, an artist and especially as a Japanese American Christian, Mako identifies with the sense of an “alien” identity that plagued Shusaku Endo all his life. Endo traveled to France for university training, one of the first Japanese to do so after World War II. He encountered racism and rejection, yet returned from Europe to his own country feeling a stranger there as well. Mako made a similar journey, only in reverse.

Born in Boston to Japanese parents, Mako became the first nonnative to study in a prestigious school of painting in Japan that dates back to the fifteenth century. While earning a Master of Fine Arts he learned the ancient Nihonga technique that relies on natural pigments derived from stone-ground minerals and from cured oyster, clam and scallop shells. Rather than painting traditional subjects such as kimonos and cherry blossoms, Fujimura applied the Nihonga style to his preferred modern medium of abstract expressionism.

Mako’s paintings now hang in major museums in Japan, Europe and the United States, and his work commands respect and high prices. Tokyo honored him with a career retrospective before he turned forty, and as a presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts he served as an American ambassador for the arts. A thoughtful Christian, he also founded the International Arts Movement to help nurture artists, and in 2014 received the Religion and the Arts Award from the American Academy of Religion. Recently he accepted an appointment to direct the Brehm Center at Fuller Seminary, thus splitting his time between studios in Pasadena and Princeton.

The core identities of an artist and a Christian create an ongoing tension. As Mako explains,

I have noticed, as an artist with a Christian faith, that if we are explicit about your faith in the public sphere—if we even mention our commitment to live a Christian life—we are dismissed right away in the art world. I have been told by influential critics that if I was not so explicit about my Christian identity, I would have had a far more mainstream career. The worst thing you can do in promoting his or her art career is to be public about how faith motivates their art. To invoke the transgressive, the cynical, the elusive may be the only way to become a respected artist; needy, shock-filled, ironical work gets attention as “serious.”

Mako believes that art can heal as well as disturb, and in contrast to some modern artists he refuses to abandon the ideal of beauty. To a single work he may apply as many as a hundred layers of paint, ground by hand from such substances as gold, silver, platinum, cinnabar and malachite. He approaches Shusaku Endo’s work in a similar fashion, probing among the multiple layers of Silence and other novels to uncover three main themes: hiddenness, ambiguity and beauty.

Hiddenness. Partly because of isolation and partly because of the periodic outbreaks of persecution, Japanese learned to bury their most treasured thoughts and emotions. Ask any Japanese the difference between honne,...