Paper short abstract:

The paper analyses pictorial negotiations of identities in nanban byōbu paintings. It focusses on their spatial setting in the littoral periphery as opposed to the capital, and examines how this marginal position is mirrored in art historical narratives.

Paper long abstract:

The Momoyama era with its intertwined political and cultural changes is well reflected in research with diverse disciplinary focusses in and outside Japan. Visual sources like fūzokuga folding screens from the 16th and 17th centuries have often been called upon for arguments in those studies. Especially details of the so-called nanban byōbu are regularly referred to, in particular their colorful depictions of European merchants arriving on the Japanese coast. In recent research, these images have often been conceived as factographic event-pictures which document trade relations and the Christian mission in the littoral periphery, insinuating that the nanban byōbu artists actually had and visualized first hand transcultural experiences. But despite the increase of merged art forms for export in the Momoyama-era, nanban byōbu were exclusively produced for Japanese connoisseurs and were neither sold to foreign merchants nor exported as diplomatic gifts. Consequently, the objectives of their pictorial negotiations were intentionally domestic.

By questioning how nanban byōbu reflect on upheavals in the sociocultural topography of the realm in the making and on issues of prestige concerning its centers and margins, the paper aims at adding a new perspective to the academic discussions of the screen paintings. It outlines processes of mobility and appropriation within Japan which led to the construction of fancy nanban-narratives in the 1590s: Capital-based, topical imageries of Europeans which were somewhat detached from Hideyoshi Toyotomis actual political measures against them. Including this context, the littoral, the peripheral region represented on nanban byōbu, is interpreted as a construction of the sociographical center, a heterotopic entity against which agents of the capital composed their own identities and endeavors.

Returning to recent receptions of nanban byōbu, it is remarkable that apparently, they are being classified and collected more often in the context of nanban bijutsu than as fūzokuga from the capital. In this respect, it will further be discussed how the spatial detachment and the incorporation of the foreign in nanban byōbu determinate their historiographic reception.