Papenberg or Takahoko Island seen from Kaminoshima

Category

Library Item

Item no

15148

Title

Papenberg or Takahoko Island seen from Kaminoshima

Description

The island of Takahoko or Papenberg sits in a bay at the entrance of Nagasaki harbour, barely visible in the misty background. The island seems inhabited and is covered with tall trees.
At the foreground is a small fishing village with Japanese flat bottomed wooden boats ('sanpan') lining the shore. A square building with a pitched roof, partially thatched, can be seen on the right-hand side of the picture. Around it are some small gardens.
There is a hand-written note at the bottom of the picture, perhaps written by the owner or the photographer, saying 'Precipice scene of Christian massacre in 1637 Nagasaki Harbour'.

Artist / maker

von Stillfried-Ratenicz, Franz

Date

1881

Size

19.5 x 24 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Art and Design Library

This item is part of a collection of prints from the studio of Baron Franz von Stillfried-Ratenicz, an Austrian photographer practising in Japan in the late 1870's. Von Stillfried ran a studio in Yokohama at the same time as his brother Raimund, who was also known as 'Baron Stillfried'. This caused a great deal of confusion with the local residents and visitors to Japan in the Meiji Period, and with art historians today.

This album, which dates from 1879-83, comprises 67 separate mounted prints presented in a lacquerware box. Albums of this kind were popular among foreign tourists, who frequently selected the individual prints they wished to include from the studio's collection. Many of these albumen prints were hand tinted. This was a laborious process for which von Stillfried employed, at the height of his success, a substantial number of Japanese workers. Like many other 'views' in this album, this particular photograph was not hand-painted. The University of Nagasaki Library owns a coloured copy of this photograph; it must have been sold for a more expensive price than the monochrome version.

Takaboko Island was situated at the North side of the channel and was a recognisable landmark for foreign ships entering the Harbour of Nagasaki. The island was also called Papenberg ('Papist Hill') by the Dutch in memory of the thousands of Christians who were thrown from the cliffs during persecutions in the 1630s and 1640s. In 1892 though, Dr.L.Riess, a professor at the University of Tokyo who had studied the history of Christian persecutions in Japan, declared that there was no mention of these events in the contemporary records and that 'it would have been absurd to drag the prisoners there'. However, perhaps because of its historical aspect, many early photographers took pictures of the island. One of these photographs was published in the Far East magazine on March 1, 1872.

The photograph in this album was taken from Kanzakibana, where Kaminoshima Catholic Church stands today. The waterfront is now different due to reclamation from the sea. A school called Kaminoshima-Aiji-En stands today where the building is on the photograph.

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Related images

Related subjects

Landscape > Land > Islands

Landscape > Water > Rivers and streams

Places > Asia > Japan

Transport > Water > Boats