Imagining and Imaging "Anthropos" In Early‐Modern Japan

Abstract

Our world has just discovered another one: and who will answer for its being the last of its brothers, since up to now its existence was unknown to the daemons, to the Sybils, and to ourselves? (Montaigne 1987(Montaigne ,1991(Montaigne :1029 The age of encounter provoked cosmological tremors for many peoples around the world, Caribs and Spaniards, Goans and Portuguese, Algonquians and English; Japan, too, was shaken by shifting cosmologies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Japanese and Europeans first encountered each other, initially in the waters of Southeast Asia, and later in the Japanese archipelago itself If Shakespeare could see himself, England, and all of Europe as a Miranda awakened by the encounter to a "brave new world" of myriad unimagined new peoples and customs, Japanese likewise had to reorder not only their cosmology, but their imaginings and imaging of the range of human variation that they encountered in the wake of Columbus. What emerged was a variety of new modes of imagining, and the visual imaging and representing of peoples-domestic and foreign-that apprehended and visualized a new, and newly-universal, category of "anthropos" in Japanese discourse. 1 Japan's first encounters with Europeans surely predated the arrival of a few Portuguese on a small island in southwestern Japan in 1543, or the landing of Francisco Xavier, who first preached in Japan in 1549, for Japanese had been voyaging to Southeast Asia at least since the late fifteenth century, and we know that some had got as far as Goa before Xavier left for Japan. 2 By the 1560s, Portuguese merchant ships, with their mixed crews of Portuguese, Goans, black Africans, and, occasionally, native peoples of the Americas, were a regular sight in Japanese port cities. Jesuits, starting with Xavier himself, proselytized in the capital of Kyoto, and in 1560 the order established a church there-commonly called the "Southern Barbarian Temple"-which brought an ongoing alien presence to the very center of Japanese cultural production. Japanese artists quickly began both to represent these newly-discovered aliens, and to learn from their modes of representation, as Jesuit mentors taught young men under their tutelage the essentials of Iberian and Italianate painting.Yet, more was at stake in these initial encounters in Japan than simply learning new and alien ways of painting, and new aliens to paint. A cosmology, too, was up for grabs. Prior to the Xavierian moment, the predominant cosmological frame for Japanese imaginings of the world had been that ofsangoku, or "three realms": Wagacho ("Our Land"), Shintan or Kara (the continent, conceived as a "China" that subsumed al 1 other continental lands and peoples, such as Korea), and Tenjiku, often rendered as "India," but conceived theologically as the land of the Buddha, and topologically as what lay beyond Kara? I think of Tenjiku as "trans-ATara," and it was a realm with which "Our Land" had no contact; no Japanese was known to have gone to Tenjiku and returned alive to tell the ...

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