Cristóvão Ferreira

Early life and career

Born around 1580, in Torres Vedras, Portugal, Ferreira was sent to Asia, where he was a missionary in Japan from 1609 to 1633, becoming the head Jesuit under the oppression of the Tokugawa shogunate.

Apostate

In 1633, Ferreira was captured and renounced Christianity after being tortured for five hours. He became the most famous of the "fallen priests" and changed his name to Sawano Chūan (Japanese: 沢野忠庵). He registered at a Buddhist temple in accordance with Japanese law, and called himself "a member of the Zen sect", but his own publications attest that he adopted a philosophy of natural law:

Viewing the world around we see that everything is endowed with its own nature and merit; bird or beast, insect or fish, grass or tree, earth or stone, air or water, each one has its natural quality and merit. All this is the work of Natura. Man stands at the head of all existence and Heaven has endowed mankind with the natural faculties of charity, justice, propriety, sagacity.

Life after apostasy

After his apostasy he married a Japanese woman and wrote several books, including treatises on Western astronomy and medicine, which became widely distributed in the Edo period. He also is alleged to have privately written a book on religion entitled 「顕偽録」 (The Deception Revealed) in 1636, but it was not published for 300 years and there is some controversy concerning who wrote it. He participated in government trials of other captured Jesuits. He was often present during the use of fumi-e, whereby suspected Christians were ordered to trample on an image of Jesus Christ.

Death

He died in Nagasaki in 1650. Just before his death he supposedly recanted, was tortured and died as a martyr.

In popular culture

Shusaku Endo's novel Silence is set in the aftermath of Ferreira's apostasy. Ferreira is played by Tetsurō Tamba in the 1971 film version and by Liam Neeson in the 2016 film version. In the 1996 Portuguese drama film Os Olhos da Ásia, João Perry plays Ferreira.