Fumi-e

A fumi-e (踏み絵, fumi "stepping-on" + e "picture"^?) was a likeness of Jesus or Mary upon which the religious authorities of the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan required suspected Christians (Kirishitan) to step on in order to prove that they were not members of that outlawed religion. The use of fumi-e began with the persecution of Christians in Nagasaki in 1629. Their use was officially abandoned when ports opened to foreigners on April 13, 1856, but some remained in use until Christian teaching was placed under formal protection during the Meiji period. The objects were also known as e-ita or ita-e, while the forced test was called e-fumi. The "ceremony of e-fumi, of trampling on images, was well enough reported in Europe already by the early eighteenth century to have left a mark on works of imaginative literature like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Oliver Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World, and Voltaire's Candide," according to Prof. Michael North in Artistic and Cultural Exchanges Between Europe and Asia, 1400–1900. In modern Japanese literature, treading on the fumi-e is a pivotal plot element of the novel Silence by Shusaku Endo.

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