Silence（沉默）, based on the Japanese novel written by Shusaku Endo (遠藤周作)，is directed by the award winning director Martin Scorsese. Most of the scenes are set in small villages or indoors, but other scenes of landscapes are shot on the splendid North Coast Shore in Taiwan. Thus, when I watched the movie, I was reminded of the picturesque ocean waves that pounded on the jagged rocks near Jinshan, and the mist that arose from layers of hills in the Yanmingshan Mountain area, or the boats that flew on the tropical background of the setting sun, as well as the caves of Shimen, where crosses were fixed onto the Japanese catholic believers’ arms, as torments of faith. The flashback of the landscapes and the storylines was quite intriguing: it made me wonder what if these believers were not Japanese but Taiwanese people under the supervision of Japanese policemen in the periods of Japanese colonialized Taiwan?
Of course, the fate of the Japanese believers of Christianity in the 1600s could not be compared with the fate of Taiwanese people as well as aborigines in the early 1900s of the colonized Taiwan. The numbers of the believers is to some degree less in quantity than those of the Taiwanese and Taiwanese aborigines in the early 1900s when Japan took over Taiwan. Can we compare people’s fate in terms of numbers? Maybe the larger amount of the tortured could claim for more sympathy because of the sacrifice is expected to be larger?
The movies related to Japanese colonized Taiwan, such as the early part of the City of Sadness(悲情城市) and Seediq Bale (賽德克巴萊)，are often depicted through landscapes to make contrast of two groups---the aboriginal controlled, and the dominant controller. The mountains, the rivers, the ocean, and the farms represent the native’s land, a locale ready to be captured and soiled with blood and insults, crimes that cannot be seen anymore, washed, and shattered into the crystalized traces of sand that floated down towards the sea, sipped inside the roots of the native’s vegetables and grow into blossoms of revengeful or pardoned seeds.
Modern movies relevant to Japanese colonized Taiwan, such as Taiwan Born Return (灣生回家) and The South of the Boundary(國境之南)， the landscapes also reveal the same nostalgic feelings of an unwanted willingness to return to/ or travel to the unknown. The landscapes represent something that we are familiar with—they are our homes and they spurge from our homeland, imbued with home’s emotions. Once the landscapes disappear, the impression of homes is lost. They are lost to Japan when the Taiwanese born Japanese were sent back to Japan when WWII ended and Japan had to leave this island. Likewise, the landscapes of the Taiwanese grandmother remembered her Japanese lover leaving Taiwan in the harbor, we do not only see the ancient flavored boat and the fogged image of the conquered Japanese, but also see the sadness of love that links the two nations.
These landscapes in silence witness the fates of these people in transition, being forced to happen on the stage of wars.
I often linger on the North Coast Shore, and I will rise and go now, go to the depth of the clouds and lapping of the sea where the sky scoops my fate. I am alive, and I am thinking, of the fates, of all these people that had witness with the landscapes.
No one is bigger or smaller.
It existed.
