(1600-1820) Nagasaki, England, America
The Shogunate's edict was absolute: the foreign faith was to be eradicated. Enki, posing as a Dutch trader, watched as priests were expelled, martyrs were made on the "Mountain of Purgatory," and the public symbols of Christianity were systematically scrubbed from the land. The Cage, in its purest form, had arrived in Japan.
But faith did not die. It went to ground.
He found them through a network of whispers and hidden signs—a fisherman who didn't fish on a Sunday, a merchant with a subtle cross woven into a basket. They were the Kakure Kirishitan—the "Hidden Christians."
In a darkened home, far from the authorities, he knelt with them. There were no priests, no churches, no sacraments. There was only a whispered, distorted Pater Noster passed from parent to child, and a small, hidden image of the Virgin Mary they called "Santa Maria-sama." Their faith was a fragile, living thing, kept alive in the secret spaces of the heart.
Their leader, an old fisherman named Ishimura, spoke with a calm that belied the danger. "The great lords can control the land and the sea," he said, his voice low. "They can even control the words we speak in the light. But they cannot control the silence in here." He tapped his chest. "The song is safest when it is not sung aloud."
Enki was humbled. This was not the fiery rebellion of Luther or the violent smash of the Luddites. This was a deeper, more patient resistance. They were not breaking the cage; they were making themselves so small and quiet that the cage's bars could not find them.
This is one way, he thought. Survival through invisibility.
Scrapbook Entry (Nagasaki): "They have turned their faith into a secret. No cathedrals, no grand theology. Just a whispered prayer in the dark and a shared, silent understanding. The Cage cannot lock what it cannot find. Here, the key has been swallowed for safekeeping."
[The chapter then continues as before, contrasting this with the other forms of rebellion in England and America...]
He carried the memory of the Kakure Kirishitan with him to England. There, the rebellion was not hidden, but shouted from the rooftops by poets, and smashed into existence by weavers. And later, in America, it was fought with the cold, hard logic of account books by abolitionists.
He saw the four fronts of the war with terrible clarity:
The Hidden (Japan): Survival through secrecy.
The Poets (England): Rebellion through beauty and feeling.
The Smashers (England): Rebellion through direct, violent action.
** The Reformers (America/UK):** Rebellion using the system's own tools.
Scrapbook Entry (Final for the Chapter): "Four rebellions, four different languages. The Japanese prayed in silence. The poets sang in beauty. The workers smashed with anger. The abolitionist calculated with numbers. The Kakure Kirishitan will survive for centuries in the dark. The others will burn brightly and be extinguished. If they had ever spoken to each other, they might have been an unstoppable army. Instead, they each fight alone, and I, the one who knows them all, am the keeper of their silence. My inaction is not wisdom. It is the deepest complicity."