How to Make “Colored” Japanese Counter-Reformation Saints – A Study of an Iconographic Anomaly
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Hitomi Omata Rappo
Abstract
The 1627 beatification of the twenty-six martyrs of Japan was a major milestone in the history of the Church and especially for the missionary orders. These martyrs were the first officially recognized saints from the newly “discovered” lands. However, while the majority of the twenty-six were in fact Japanese, surviving paintings depict them as white-skinned missionaries and without any physical features that would have been considered “typically Asian” at the time. This paper analyzes this iconographic tradition and shows how it can be understood as a consequence of a process of assimilation of Christian Japan into the Catholic world view. Associating particular skin color with true faith and civilization was part of discourses that blended the physical “otherness” of these martyrs. This paper demonstrates how these discourses point to the first seeds of a racial perception of East Asians, which would later become the notion of “yellow.”
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Race as a Category of Anthropological Difference in the Formative Stage of Peripheral Catholicism
- From Neophyte to Non-White: Moral Theology and Race Mixture in Colonial Brazil
- How to Make “Colored” Japanese Counter-Reformation Saints – A Study of an Iconographic Anomaly
- Human Sacrifice: Religious Act or Vicious Desire? Testing the Limits of Tolerance with Vitoria and Las Casas
- Gregorio López (1617–1691): The first Chinese Bishop
- Japanese Christian Women through the Eyes of a Seventeenth Century Spanish Merchant
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Race as a Category of Anthropological Difference in the Formative Stage of Peripheral Catholicism
- From Neophyte to Non-White: Moral Theology and Race Mixture in Colonial Brazil
- How to Make “Colored” Japanese Counter-Reformation Saints – A Study of an Iconographic Anomaly
- Human Sacrifice: Religious Act or Vicious Desire? Testing the Limits of Tolerance with Vitoria and Las Casas
- Gregorio López (1617–1691): The first Chinese Bishop
- Japanese Christian Women through the Eyes of a Seventeenth Century Spanish Merchant
