Abstract
This essay examines a pair of six-panel folding screens known as the Arrival of the Southern Barbarians (Nanban-jin torai-zu byōbu) at the Kobe City Museum. The screens are dated between 1597 and 1616, during the time when an unprecedented wave of Portuguese and Spanish sailors, merchants, and missionaries, accompanied by their African, South, and Southeast Asian servants and slaves arrived on the shores of Japan. This sudden appearance of previously unimagined peoples of different race and culture posed a serious challenge to Japan’s long-established cosmology centered on the “three countries” of Japan, China, and India. The painting is one of the first attempts at apprehending and visualizing these new foreign Others, or the “Southern Barbarians” (Nanban). The juxtaposition of the old and new, and the realistic and fantastical imageries in the portrayal of foreigners in the Arrival of the Southern Barbarians exhibits the artist’s creativity provoked by the encounter and his articulate use of the existing codes in visualizing the newly discovered foreign Others. Through an analysis of the people and places depicted in the paintings, this essay aims to illuminate ways in which Japanese artists of the early modern period envisioned these foreigners within their own, reordered cosmology.