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The screens of the Shimabara rebellion : Peasant uprisings, martyred Christians, disputed heroes, and dissention in the archive

University of British Columbia

In the Akizuki Kyodo Kan in Fukuoka Prefecture stands a pair of Japanese screens, produced in 1838 to commemorate the suppression of the Shimabara Rebellion (1637-8). The rebellion is significant because it essentially marks the end of the "Christian Century" (1549-1650) or Namban (Southern Barbarian) era and the beginning of two hundred years of Tokugawa domination and Japanese isolation. In looking at the screens and proceeding through their narrative, we find ourselves impressed with their representation of military force and effort that was needed to suppress the rebellion. Yet anyone familiar with the story of the Shimabara Rebellion soon realizes that the depiction on the screens is much different from the renditions of the same event with which many Japanese today are accustomed. Pictorial choices made during the screens' production in the nineteenth-century result in a visual presentation that is completely in favour of the government forces, rather than the Christian defenders led by now folk-legend Amakusa Shiro. What is passed down to us then is a visual product, in the guise of victorious commemoration, that reflects the social conditions of the 1830s when the screens were made, one which expresses the concerns of the ruling elite in the wake of serious political and social discontent. However it is not my aim only to exercise a form of social art history to place the screens in their contemporary context. In working through various Japanese and Western documents from different times regarding the rebellion, my research has shown significant disparities amongst these representations. Yet it is through these very archival disparities - distortions, contradictions, and omissions - that the process of how history is formulated and constructed is revealed. By expanding beyond sources traditionally associated with the screens (for example Japanese literature, diaries, official records, and Western historical interpretations) to consider a wider range of sources including tombstones and memorial monuments and anti-Christian propaganda, my thesis will work to show how information is crafted to fit specific social, political, or ideological positions. Such crafting of history, in this case manifested in the various constructs of the Shimabara Rebellion, is achieved by the drawing together of a number of discourses: traditional Japanese war and peasant narratives, Christian martyrdom stories, and folklore constructed around notions of heroism and sacrifice. In the end, I hope to show that the historically incongruous, which is often shunted aside with academic disdain, can be valuable in understanding history. Though stripping away ambiguities or contradictions may reveal a common linear thread, such an endeavour also detracts from the richness and complexity of the narrative, perhaps even shrouding the more sinister mechanisms of the historical process. In approaching an amended archive with this concern in mind provides us with the means to measure Japanese and Western attitudes regarding Christian and foreign influence in the country, the legacy that persists into the present, and the process by which this legacy is affected and shaped over time. In recognizing the forces that affect the documenting of history, and how they are articulated pictorially in the Akizuki screens, we can more clearly appreciate the subtle and ingenious relationship between power and knowledge.

Text

2013-05-30

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/44528

Fine Arts

University of British Columbia

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