Illustration of the Arrival of Southern Barbarians in Color

What the Namban-jin Toraizu Screens Depict

Stand in front of the left screen and the first thing to catch your eye is the rigging. A great square-rigged carrack fills the left three of the six panels, its hull crowded with figures in voluminous breeches and tall hats, while smaller boats ferry bundles toward a shoreline shaded by pines. Cross to the right screen and the story moves inland: a procession winds up from the foreground toward a bridge at the center, and on the far bank, above a band of pine and rows of houses and shops, sits a galleried building where robed missionaries wait at the gate. Around them, ordinary townspeople crane their necks to watch.

These two six-panel folding screens are known in Japanese as Namban-jin Toraizu, "the arrival of the Namban people." Namban, literally "southern barbarians," was the word the Japanese gave to the Portuguese and Spanish who reached their shores from the south by sea in the second half of the sixteenth century. The subject was wildly popular: roughly seventy painted screens on this theme survive today, a number that rivals the famous views of Kyoto produced in the same era.

The screens are painted in mineral colors on paper laid with gold leaf, the gold applied in soft mist-shaped bands rather than as a solid ground. Each screen stands about 154 centimeters high and stretches some 364 centimeters wide, so the pair together commands a wall several meters across. They belong to the collection cared for at the Tokyo National Museum in Ueno, Tokyo.

One detail sets this version apart from most: it shows only scenes set in Japan. There is no foreign port, no distant city of the imagination. The whole drama, from ship to bridge to church, plays out on Japanese soil.

Why the Screens Were Designated an Important Cultural Property

The pair was designated an Important Cultural Property on June 9, 1960, together with a companion pair of map screens, the Sekai oyobi Nihon Zu ("World and Japan Maps"). The two pairs share a single designation and a single history, and they are valued as much for what they reveal about a moment in Japanese history as for their craftsmanship.

That moment was the brief decades when Japan looked outward. Portuguese ships had begun calling at Kyushu ports from the 1540s, bringing firearms, silk, exotic animals, and Jesuit missionaries. Painters responded to the curiosity these visitors stirred, and the Namban screen became a genre of its own. Among the survivors, this example is regarded as showing a comparatively early and old-fashioned composition, which is part of why it carries such weight for historians.

Like most screens of its kind, it bears no signature. By the precision of the brushwork and the disciplined arrangement of the crowds, it is thought to be the work of a painter trained in the Kanō school, the workshop lineage that supplied much of the finest decorative painting of the age. The exact hand remains unknown, and the catalogue records it simply as a Kanō-school work.

The companion map screens add a second layer of significance. One screen carries a world map drawn in an oval projection with the Atlantic at its center, a vermillion line tracing a circumnavigation route that runs from near Portugal all the way to Nagasaki. The other carries a map of Japan that descends from the medieval Gyoki mapping tradition but renders coastlines, and especially Kyushu, with new accuracy. These maps are thought to have been made in Japan around 1592, drawing on European geographic knowledge that missionaries had carried east, and they rank among the earliest map screens produced in the country.

What to Look For Up Close

The pleasure of a Namban screen lies in its density. Slow down, and the painted port turns into a catalogue of a curious age.

On the left screen, follow the cargo. Small craft pull up to the beach and crews haul bundles ashore, where a knot of foreigners waits beneath the pines to receive them. The Namban figures are unmistakable: long-legged, large-nosed, dressed in puffed trousers and broad hats, a fashion that Japanese viewers of the time found as strange as the goods being unloaded.

On the right screen, the eye is meant to travel upward along the procession to the church at the top. This galleried building represents a Namban-ji, one of the Christian churches that stood in Japanese towns before the faith was banned. At its gate, missionaries receive the arriving party, while townspeople gather to watch a ceremony most of them did not understand. The figure leading the procession would have been read by contemporaries as the captain-major, the senior Portuguese officer who often doubled as governor of Macao.

Look, too, at the gold. Rather than gilding the entire surface, the painter laid the leaf in drifting cloud-bands that frame the action and lift the figures forward. It is a technique that rewards a few minutes of quiet attention, the kind of looking the screens were made for when they stood in a daimyo's reception room.

Around the Tokyo National Museum

The screens are kept at the Tokyo National Museum, which sits at the northern end of Ueno Park, an easy walk from Ueno Station. Japan's oldest museum, founded in 1872, fills several buildings: the Honkan for Japanese art, the Toyokan for the rest of Asia, the Heiseikan for archaeology, and the Gallery of Horyuji Treasures.

Ueno Park itself makes a full day. Within a short walk are the National Museum of Western Art, whose main building was designed by Le Corbusier and is listed as a World Heritage Site, the National Museum of Nature and Science, Ueno Zoo, and the lotus-covered Shinobazu Pond. Above the park stand Kaneiji, the temple founded to guard Edo from the northeast, and the small but richly decorated Ueno Tosho-gu shrine.

If you want to extend the Namban theme, the Kobe City Museum holds a celebrated pair of Namban screens signed by Kano Naizen, and the Suntory Museum of Art in Tokyo owns another fine pair. Both are also designated Important Cultural Properties and appear in rotation rather than on permanent view.