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THE CONVERSION OF JAPAN

Date: December 26, 1982, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 7, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline: By Julian Moynahan; Julian Moynahan teaches English at Rutgers University. He is working on a book entitled ''Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture.''
Lead: THE SAMURAI By Shusaku Endo. Translated by Van C. Gessel. 272 pp. New York: Harper & Row. $12.95.

SHUSAKU ENDO is modern Japan's most distinguished Roman Catholic novelist. If that description makes you blink, consider that a cross-national survey of religious belief published in American newspapers within the past year reported that among the populations studied, the Japanese came last in the percentage of people expressing any belief in immortality or the survival of the soul after death. Another recent survey, comparing I.Q. averages among populations of some leading nations, Eastern and Western, places the Japanese at the very top. It would seem, then, that Mr. Endo has his work cut out for him. Willy-nilly, a great part of his primary readership will be extra-bright people who are either not religious at all or who profess attachment to a religion for the sake of social solidarity, tradition, ceremony or worldly advancement.
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Mr. Endo certainly knows about this secularist tendency of his countrymen, and he knows that it is not a new thing. For ''The Samurai,'' which is set near the beginning of the 17th century, abounds in descriptions of the plight of a Spanish missionary who wants to preach Catholicism in Japan:

* ''In order to spread God's teaching in Japan ... there is only one possible method. We must cajole them into it. Espana must offer to share its profits from trade on the Pacific with the Japanese in return for sweeping proselytizing privileges. The Japanese will sacrifice anything else for the sake of profits.''

* ''If a religion promises all the benefits of this life - the amassing of wealth, victory in battle, the healing of disease - the Japanese snatch it up, but they seem totally insensitive to the supernatural and the eternal.''

* ''The Japanese touch for acquiring worldly wealth is almost too sensitively attuned, but they have not the slightest feeling for things eternal.''

* ''Your cunning and wisdom are directed only towards the profit of this world. You move swiftly, like a lizard pouncing upon its prey.'' These reflections come from the diary of Father Pedro Velasco, a Franciscan missionary to Japan who is perfectly acquainted with the native language and culture. The last jotting is made while he lies in a noisome prison, waiting to be burned at the stake, an event that will mark the failure of his mission simultaneously with his translation from priest to holy martyr. He should have known that he could not succeed, for even the zealots of the Jesuit order who came to Japan years earlier had suspended their missionary activity in the face of brutal persecutions of the order and its few thousand converts.

But Father Velasco, who carries the blood of the conquistadors in his veins and is something of a spiritual Don Quixote, had been possessed by a proud dream of succeeding where the rival order had failed. He would exploit the very secularist and materialist tendencies of the Japanese to accomplish the Lord's work. His was a bold idea, yet his failure has been utter. Or has it been? For a man caught up in Father Velasco's plotting, the low-ranking samurai of the book's title, Hasekura Rokuemon, whom the priest pitilessly exploited for the sake of the larger goal of converting multitudes, has undergone a profound, inexplicable conversion to Christ and has already gone on to his own lonely martyrdom.

Along with the conversion of one or two others, this singular, haphazard and pitiful conversion of Hasekura (Father Velasco remains ignorant of it to the end) may have been what God intended all along. Mr. Endo's notion of Catholic Christianity is that it is, or ought to be, a religion of losers and victims. No wonder Graham Greene hails him as ''one of the finest living novelists.'' But Mr. Greene must also have had in mind the sheer drama of the surprising story the Japanese has to tell and the rich yet delicate art of its telling.

I must now attempt to summarize a plot that illustrates the complexity of the Japanese mind in general and of Mr. Endo's in particular. Remember that the events belong to history as well as to fiction. From a great breadth and depth of scholarship and original research, much of it of necessity carried out in the West, Mr. Endo has written a sort of historical fiction, though not the usual escapist kind. His meanings, moreover, are for many cultures and all seasons.

Around 1612 a regional shogun, or king, on the northeast coast of the main island of Japan, noting the increasing centralized power of the new, Christian-persecuting imperial dynasty at Edo (Tokyo), enters into a close conspiracy with Father Velasco to strengthen his regional power by developing trade connections with the Philippines and far-off Mexico. He writes a letter to the Pope declaring his personal conversion to the Roman Catholic faith and inviting in missionaries to convert the people of his realm. Other letters and representations are to go to the Spanish viceroy in Mexico and to the Spanish court at Madrid, making clear that in return for this open invitation to proselytize, the breakaway shogun will expect substantial commerce and technological exchange with the Spanishdominated Pacific and colonial Latin America.

Father Velasco organizes the crucial diplomatic expedition to Mexico, Spain and Rome that will attempt to bring this innovative trade-off to fruition. A great ship is fitted out under the supervision of some stranded Spanish mariners, and the Franciscan sets sail with a company of Japanese merchants, three low-ranking samurai of the northeast region and their servants and another minor lord who spies on the rest for the shogun's council of high-ranking lords.

The appallingly difficult journey and mission take four years to carry out and are a slowly unraveling disaster from the very first. Though Velasco arranges for the public ''conversion'' of the merchants in Mexico and even persuades the three samurai to profess nominal Christianity after they have struggled on to Madrid, a positive response to his request for trade treaties and support for his missions is not forthcoming at either place, largely owing to the intrigues of the Jesuits, who are convinced that all Christian missionary work in Japan is impossible for the time being. The Franciscan, a man of imperious will, drives his constantly shrinking Japanese party onward to Rome, where he debates a Jesuit specialist on Japan before the papal Curia and makes a sufficient impression to win an audience with the Pope. But all his efforts are rendered nugatory when word reaches Rome by way of the Philippines that the Edo Emperor, extending his power over all Japan, has now banned Christianity from his entire realm and has begun a systematic persecution-unto-death of all who refuse to recant their Catholic beliefs.

THERE are further developments and revelations that can be left to the reader to discover. Suffice it to say that neither the samurai lords nor Father Velasco is extended a grateful welcome when they struggle back to the shores of Japan, the former in sad bewilderment, the latter in a disguise swiftly penetrated by the coastal authorities. It is painfully clear that the priest has been duped from the start. The Japanese, wishing to develop prosperous trade with the West and to steal the secrets of Western invention and technology, have merely used the issue of religion as a cover and a stalking horse.

''The Samurai'' is a great travel narrative, among other things; its re-creations of place, from Hasekura's marshy homeland in northeast Japan, to the storm-tossed eastern and western oceans, to the deserts of central Mexico, to the pomps of Baroque Madrid and Rome, are extraordinary. Much of what we see is from the viewpoint of Hasekura. He is a deeply traditional and humble knight whose keynote is fidelity - to family, village and overlord - and who is utterly bewildered, even stunned, to discover that somehow Christ has made him His follower. He has the face for it. His sunken eyes and protruding cheekbones resemble those of the figure on the cross that accompanies the Velasco party everywhere on its impossible journey: ''an emaciated man, hung upon a cross, his head drooping,'' the image of God as supreme scapegoat.

THIS English version of ''The Samurai'' by Van C. Gessel is very eloquent. The question of its accuracy as a translation must be left to others. Mr. Endo employs repetitive descriptions and images - for example, of snow and cold on the marsh, of the Japanese as a stream of black ants venturing across the Pacific, of the distant laugh of a woman that appears to mock Father Velasco's pride and presumption of success - in a style that is Japanese; yet these procedures adapt to our Western conventions of storytelling perfectly. And some of the descriptions - of storms at sea and of swans and ducks in the marsh in late fall - are as striking as classic Japanese woodcuts. Most of the narrative is distributed between the priest and the samurai as centers of consciousness. Their dialectic of East and West gives us a truer history than a hundred expert accounts from a single perspective only.

It is, however, a little perplexing to be told so emphatically about the materialism of the Japanese in a Japanese work animated by so rich and full a spiritual vision as Mr. Endo's ''The Samurai.''