Stomping on a Christian Icon

The somber but serene expression on this young woman’s face belies the frightening experience she is about to endure when she is forced to stomp on a tablet with an image of a cross. Literally meaning “picture to step on,” fumi-e were tablets, usually made of brass or stone, that featured a likeness of Jesus, Mary or, as here, a cross. During the Edo period, the Tokugawa shogunate outlawed Christianity and required suspected Christian adherents to step on and dishonor the image on the fumi-e in order to prove that they were not followers of the forbidden foreign religion. Refusal was punishable by death.

Partially cropped by the border of the mounting, the woman appears as if she is moving forward, just stepping into our view. The soft outlines and indistinct treatment of the red spotted motifs on her kimono imbue the figure with a dream-like quality, which runs counter to the sense of angst inherent in the circumstances depicted. Although there remains some trace of the artist’s earlier, eroticized depictions of women, This work is rather more redolent of Taishō romanticism. During the 1910s and 1920s, as Nihonga artists sought to expand their repertoires, they not only looked to the West and greater Asia for new themes, but also to Japanese historical subjects.This work, with all its connotations of Nanban (literally, “southern barbarian”) culture, which originated with the arrival of the Portuguese missionaries and merchants in sixteenth-century Japan, conjured up an exotic, long past era.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, there are at least two other paintings by Tsunetomi virtually identical to this one, except for the absence of the tablet, which perhaps explains why the expression of the face of the woman here does not betray any particular tension—it might not have been originally conceived with this topic in mind. One is in the collection of The British Museum, referred to by curators as Musume / Young Girl and dated to ca. 1921–22 (2001,1123,0.2); the other work, Standing Bijin (dated 1921) is in the Yokoyama Taikan Memorial Hall, Tokyo (see Hashizume Setsuya, Kitano Tsunetomi ten, 2003, pl. 38).

A native of Kanazawa in Ishikawa Prefecture and trained as an engraver for newspaper printing, Kitano Tsunetomi moved to Osaka and studied with Ineno Toshitsune. After working as a successful newspaper illustrator, he pursued a career in painting. His regular participation in national exhibitions began when his work was accepted to the 1910 Bunten Exhibition. Many awards followed, and soon Tsunetomi gained national recognition for his bijinga, or “paintings of beautiful women,” which were often perceived as explicitly erotic and decadent. The sense of realism Tsunetomi achieved in his early work is thought to reflect his study of Western-style oil painting at the end of the Meiji period. In 1917, Tsunetomi became a member of the Japan Art Institute (Nihon Bijutsuin), and thereafter his painting began to manifest an increasingly refined conservatism. One of the earliest Nihonga artists from Osaka to attain national fame, Tsunetomi galva¬nized the Osaka painting circle and nurtured many prominent local artists, including Nakamura Teii and Shima Seien.