Silence

Kichijiro is the first Japanese person who Rodrigues and Garrpe meet. He is characterized as a drunk, a coward, and a repeat apostate. Although Kichijiro tries to deny his Christianity when he meets the priests in China, both men immediately suspect that he is a member of their faith. As they discover after reaching Japan with him, Kichijiro apostatized years before, when his family was tortured and executed for their faith. Throughout the story, Kichijiro not only apostatizes several more times, but betrays Rodrigues and other Christians to the Japanese officials either for money or to save himself, taking on a role similar to the biblical Judas Iscariot within the narrative. In spite of his constant betrayal, Kichijiro follows Rodrigues all throughout his flight, imprisonment, and even after his eventual apostasy. Kichijiro begs for the priest’s forgiveness and seeking absolution, even voluntarily offering himself for imprisonment so that he can be close to Rodrigues. Rodrigues wavers between feeling sympathy, resentment, and hatred for the treacherous Kichijiro, which causes him to often reflect on Christ’s relationship to Judas—whether Christ loved the man he knew would betray him, and whether Judas was only a puppet, given the worst role in a grander narrative. By the end of Rodrigues’s imprisonment, as he realizes that he will apostatize and become as much like Judas as Kichijiro, he also realizes that Kichijiro has doggedly pursued him around Japan, and although a traitor, is ironically also his most loyal friend. When Kichijiro asks the apostate Rodrigues to hear his confession as a priest, this confirms to Rodrigues that he can still serve God, even as a reject of the Church and betrayer of the faith.