A fumi-e was a likeness of Jesus or Mary onto which the religious authorities of the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan required suspected Christians to step, in order to demonstrate that they were not members of that outlawed religion.
History
The use of fumi-e began with the persecution of Christians in Nagasaki in 1629. Their use was officially abandoned when ports opened to foreigners on 13 April 1856, but some remained in use until Christian teaching was placed under formal protection during the Meiji period. The objects were also known as e-ita or ita-e, while the forced test was called e-fumi. The Japanese government used fumi-e to reveal practicing Catholics and sympathizers. Fumi-e were pictures of the Virgin Mary and Christ. Government officials made suspected Christians trample on these pictures. People reluctant to step on the pictures were identified as Catholics and were sent to Nagasaki. The policy of the Edo government was to turn them from their faith, Catholicism; however, if the Catholics refused to change their religion, they were tortured. As many of them still refused to abandon the religion, they were killed by the government. Executions sometimes took place at Nagasaki's Mount Unzen, where some were boiled in the hot springs. Execution for Christianity was unofficially abandoned by the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1805. Eighteenth-century Europe was aware enough of e-fumi for authors of fiction to mention it when alluding to Japan, as in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Oliver Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World, and Voltaire's Candide. In modern Japanese literature, treading on the fumi-e is a pivotal plot element ofthe novelSilence by Shūsaku Endō. Many theologians have tried to contemplate the role of the fumi-e to Japanese Christians, some seeing the treading of the fumi-e as a sign of the love and forgiveness of Jesus Christ. Several secretly practicing Christianity did fumi-e and then maintained their beliefs secretly ; there were 20,000 secret Christians in Japan when Christianity was legalized again, down from 500,000 in Nagasaki during the height of Christian belief pre-Fumi-e. University of Auckland professor Mark Mullins concluded that "In that sense, the policies were effective." Nagasaki Junshin Catholic University professor Simon Hill stated that if all of the fumie participants had instead chosen to be defiant and died, Christianity would not have continued in Japan; he stated "It is only because some made an existential decision to trample on the fumie, that Christianity in Japan was able to survive."
Form
Fumi-e were usually cast from bronze, but others were made of painted stone and some were woodblock prints. There are relatively few surviving fumi-e, as most were simply thrown away or recycled for other uses. Some examples were displayed by the Smithsonian in their 2007 exhibition "Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries."
