Fumi-e began first to be used against Christians in
Nagasaki in 1629. Residents of Nagasaki, whether commoner, Buddhist monk or samurai, were required to tread on the icons which were brought from house to house. Their use was officially abandoned when ports opened to foreigners on 13 April 1856, but some remained in use until Christian teaching was placed under formal protection during the
Meiji era. The icons were also known as
e-ita or
ita-e. The forced test was called
e-fumi.
Fumi-e contained images of the Virgin Mary and
Jesus, which government officials ordered all to trample on. Those who were reluctant or refused to do so were arrested for being Christians. The policy of the shogunate was to get them to
abjure the faith. If they refused they would be
tortured. If they still refused to abjure, they would be killed. Some executions took place at
Nagasaki's
Mount Unzen, where the Christians were boiled in the hot springs. Execution for Christianity was unofficially abandoned by the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1805. Eighteenth-century Europe was aware enough of
e-fumi for authors of fiction to mention it when alluding to Japan, as in
Jonathan Swift's ''
Gulliver's Travels'' (1726), In modern Japanese literature, treading on the
fumi-e is a pivotal plot element of the novel
Silence by
Shūsaku Endō and
the 2016 film of the same name. Christians would sometimes perform the
e-fumi yet continue to practice their beliefs secretly (
Kakure Kirishitan); there were some 20,000 secret Christians in Japan when Christianity was legalized again, down from 500,000 in Nagasaki at the height of Japanese Christianity before the persecution.
University of Auckland professor Mark Mullins concluded that "In that sense, the fumi-e policies were effective." ==Interpretations==