Can Visual Culture Studies Contribute to Human Dignity? Protestant Missions and Image Conflict in Meiji Japan: Icon-Aversion and Image Negotiation

This lecture asks what it means for visual culture studies—often positioned at some remove from moral philosophy or political theory—to speak responsibly about a heavyweight concept such as human dignity. Rather than treating dignity as an abstract norm defined from first principles, I approach it as something produced, contested, withheld, or damaged through visual practices: the making, withholding, circulation, reproduction, and appropriation of images. I argue that attending to image conflict—and, crucially, to the negotiation of image ownership—is not ancillary to dignity but one of its most revealing historical terrains, and one still painfully under-articulated in global discussions today. 

The focus is Japan’s formative period from the mid Edo period into the Meiji era, when Protestant missions became a dense contact zone for competing regimes of seeing. On one side stood a missionary visual culture shaped by what Horst Bredekamp describes as a Protestant–Platonic icon-aversion—an unease about images that is not simply theological but also epistemic, tied to claims about truth, mediation, and to the polemical charge of “idolatry”. Yet the situation was triangular rather than binary. Another pole comprised elite projects of “civilisation” and moral governance, informed by Neo-Confucian hierarchies and nationalist imperatives, including kokugaku, that mobilised images to classify, instruct, and police social difference. A third pole was the situated, overwritten modernity of commoners, who increasingly appropriated images—and their production and circulation—as media of negotiation and as symbols through which participatory rights and claims to livelihood could be articulated. In this setting, images were never merely illustrative or devotional: they were sites where mediation itself was contested—authorised, refused, regulated, and negotiated—prompting disputes over propriety, authorship, possession, legitimacy, and the rights to look and to show. 

Methodologically, the lecture combines visual analysis with intellectual and social history, reading missionary image practices—shaped by theological didactics, mission strategy, and public dissemination—alongside Japanese discourses of civility, social order, and the visualisation of the holy. I track moments when images become flashpoints: when icon-aversion collides with the demand to visualise; when “documentation” slips into misrepresentation; and when the reproduction of Orientalist visual templates intersects with domestic hierarchies bearing down on the marginalised majority of the common classes. These frictions bring dignity into view not as a stable attribute, but as a negotiated relation structured by asymmetries of power and access. 

By situating dignity within the lived politics of image conflict, the lecture advances a modest but urgent claim: visual culture studies can contribute to dignity precisely by showing how images become sites of contest over recognition, ownership, and survival—and by making visible the ethical costs of treating images as freely extractable objects rather than socially situated relations.