Paper short abstract:

The Spinner Collection constitutes a unique theological study of Japanese religion through its visual material. The paper investigates the icons and contributing artists with focus on the atelier of Kanda Sōtei, to trace the complexity and variety of sacral art production in pre-modern Japan.

Paper long abstract:

Sacral art, whether of high or low cost, translated religious authority into visual power and occupied an important place within consumerism, and thus a place in the minds and homes of the people. This paper takes the Spinner Collection as a case study to investigate the nineteenth-century activity radius of artists engaged in sacral art production. It further highlights the potential of objects of faith to be witnesses of religious developments with widespread impact for common devotees in pre-modern Japan.

The Spinner Collection comprises approximately 480 objects collected by Wilfried Spinner, the first Swiss missionary to Japan, during his stay in Tokyo between 1885 and 1891. It has been quietly kept at the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich since 1985 and was rediscovered by the author only in 2012.

The collection embodies a rare attempt to gather material for religious studies through visual sources. It underlines the missionary's theological focus on the lived and practised faith of the commoners. The subjective impression of the mundane and non-uniform appearance of the scrolls, paper sheets and small private statues is deceptive. The intellectual content is immense and its structure allows insight into the formation of a collection with immaterial purpose.

The icons act as a window to the versatile pictorial production of artists such as Yukawa Harunobu, engaging both in secular and sacral print production. A similarly enlightening source is the group of drawings by the atelier of Kanda Sōtei in Ueno, an atelier that provided the Tokugawa shogunate with sacral images. They highlight the capacity of an atelier initially dedicated to religious images of the shogunate, more precisely the doctrines of Tenkai that visually unfolded at the temples of Kanei-ji and Rinnō-ji. Nevertheless, by the 19th century they served a vast array of temples mainly located in the Kantō region, producing icons regardless of schools. The lively communications between schools in the Edo period have been highlighted by scholars such as Sueki Fumihiko in the last decades. The activity of the Kanda atelier underlines this theory from the angle of the material production.