Stepping on the Sacred: Fumi-e, Hidden Faith, and the Artist’s Dilemma

1. Fumi-e as Icon and Trial: Thresholds of Silence and Form

We have entered “Fumi-e” culture in US. Here’s an indigo sketch for “Art Is: A Journey into the Light” (Yale University Press) out this fall (Oct 21 release) below. This sketch is from the original Hagiwara Fumi-e of 17th century Japan to identify and ostracize. I speak about this in “Silence and Beauty” (IVpress) as well.

In “Silence and Beauty”, I introduce the concept of a “fumie culture” by meditating on the physical act of trampling upon the face of Christ—fumie—starting in 17th-century Japan. These were small bronze or wooden images, usually of Christ or the Virgin Mary, placed on the ground by Tokugawa authorities and used as a test of loyalty. To step on the image was to renounce one’s faith, or at least to perform such a renunciation publicly. Those who refused were tortured, exiled, or executed. But the deeper wound was internal. To step on the face of Christ was to enter a realm of ambiguity, shame, and silence.

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A facsimile of this image was recreated as a prop for Martin Scorsese’s “Silence” based on the infamous Shūsaku Endo’s novel. This is the image of the first Fumi-e used in the film in which Kichijiro betrays his family to stay alive. The Executive Producer gifted me with this bronze facsimile at the Sundance Film Festival. The photo is at the end of the subscriber’s only section.

We stand at the threshold, with the fumi-e in front of us: an image made to be stepped on.

A quiet Christ, cast in bronze. Not triumphant, but bowed. The face not lifted in judgment, but turned slightly—almost as if listening. This is not a martyr’s icon. It is an instrument of compliance. The fumi-e was not created to inspire devotion, but to destroy it. It was not sacred, and yet it have become one of the treasures housed in Tokyo National Museum.

We start with an object, an “art”. The ritual of negation, performed by thousands each year. Step or refuse. Copper beneath the sandal, silence all around. Not a spectacle, but a trial written into the texture of ordinary life. The bronze Christ now worn smooth. Apostasy becomes bureaucratic—filed, recorded, expected. The violence is precise, procedural, and refined.

What kind of image is made to be destroyed?

And what kind of spirit can survive in the shadow of that destruction?

These questions do not belong only to the past.

This is not only a story of repression. A stranger paradox unfolds here.

Under the same Tokugawa regime that criminalized Christianity and sealed Japan from foreign influence, the country entered one of its most luminous aesthetic periods. Edo peace gave rise to restraint, and restraint birthed beauty. Artists were commissions. There were many notable collaborations. Haiku, Noh, lacquerware, ink: each art form became an act of distillation and celebration of the increased power of farm land owners. There is a curious intimacy between political control that lead to stability, and aesthetic flourishing. When the public sphere contracts, expression does not vanish—it transforms itself in a deeper realm. It retreats inward. It learns the grammar of concealment.

We, too, live in a world of thresholds and trials—though our trials are ambient, dispersed, and harder to name. We are not summoned to step on sacred images and ideals. We are asked to edit ourselves continuously, perform certainty, and surrender nuance. Surveillance culture is not a regime of spies, but of shared glances, metrics, and invisible algorithms. We curate our lives for visibility, yet fear being seen too clearly. We are observed, always, and so we learn to observe ourselves: a panopticon of the soul.

Alongside this, the churn of the culture wars has become a ritual of its own—a contemporary fumi-e. We are asked, daily, to step. To declare. To post, to signal, to identify our allegiance with sharpness and immediacy. To remain quiet is suspect. To hold complexity is weakness. We are no longer exiled for belief, but exhausted by the impossibility of nuance.

In such a world, what happens to faith? To contemplation? To art?

The early Japanese Christians, faced with obliteration, did not respond with defiance and martyrdom alone. Many became hidden. The Kakure (Hidden) Kirishitan carried their faith beneath language imbedded, and in some ways defined, culture. This is the world of navigation, and ambivalence, that Endo depicts in “Silence”. Later on, the survival of faith, under 250 years of persecution, depends on crypto-faith. Prayers disguised as chants. Icons disguised as household statues. Ritual without explanation. They learned the way of concealment—not to deceive, but to preserve.

Is it so different now?

The sacred, in our time, may not need to be defended in clear and obvious ways of not stepping on a fumi-e. But it may need to be hidden in patterns that social media algorithms do not recognize. Our true intentions may need to be buried in gestural ambiguity. Perhaps preserved through aesthetic withdrawal. This is not cowardice, but fidelity—fidelity to something more ancient than modern ideology.

This is the world Rikyū helped shape.

He was not a professed Christian. He never saw a fumi-e. And yet, his art carries the same grammar of survival. Survival of faith; survival of an indelible image and culture. He created a world of deliberate imperfection, of quiet interiority. In a time of bloody rituals and the violence of rising power, he taught the virtue of disappearance. His aesthetic was not a rebellion—it was a resistance of a different order. A theology of absence. A liturgy of ash of coals and steam of a tea kettle.

Before we meet him, we linger one moment longer with the image of a fumi-e:

The bronze face, still in the dust.

Not speaking, but receiving.

Not crushed by being stepped upon, but present fully in the ghost image.

Next issue: Rikyū’s Ghost: The Aesthetic of Withholding