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Paper short abstract

The Visual Vocality theory treats images as media that speak in social negotiation. Through late-Edo Ontake pilgrimage icons and a Meiji-era missionary archive, I show how commoners used devotional prints to claim access, authority, and dignity against modernity's image bias.

Paper long abstract

Modern accounts of Japanese religion and visuality often reproduce modernity’s image bias: images are treated as illustration, affect, or “superstition,” while rational agency is located in text. This paper proposes “visual vocality” as an intervention in visual culture and media studies: the capacity of images to operate as speech acts and semiotic agents in social conflict, especially where non-elite actors are excluded from authoritative textual discourse.

The core case study is a printed icon (miei 御影) of Kaiun Myōken Daibosatsu from Mount Ontake (Kiso, Nagano), preserved in the late nineteenth-century Spinner collection in Zurich. The image records donor names and was produced by an Edo-period Kagura kō, a lay association that also commissioned a sculpture and built a small chapel on the mountain. Ontake had become a major commoner pilgrimage site by the late eighteenth century, as communities sought divine protection amid famine and economic strain. Under Tokugawa surveillance, unauthorized monuments and religious associations could be punished; I argue that the printed icon functioned as low-cost, mobile evidence of collective authorship and a public claim to inhabit sacred space.

A second strand addresses method and archive. I use Wilfrid Spinner’s collecting practices (1885–1891) as evidence for how such voices become recoverable. Unlike many imperial collectors, Spinner did not select objects for aesthetic splendour or as proof of absurdity; he documented pilgrimage routes, local iconographies, and household-scale images without ridicule, effectively preserving vernacular media ecologies that later iconoclastic and rationalist regimes—both Protestant and Meiji—worked to discredit.

Bringing together object analysis, media analysis of print circulation, and archival and field-based historiography, the paper argues that early modern Japanese images were not passive “visual culture” but operative media of agency. “Visual vocality” offers a transferable concept for media panels concerned with how publics form, negotiate authority, and contest knowledge hierarchies through images.