Brazilian Cannibals in Sixteenth-Century Europe and Seventeenth-Century Japan

TL;DR

This article uses three case studies to trace how images of Brazilian cannibals moved from sixteenth-century European travel accounts into seventeenth-century Japanese maps and prints, where they were adapted into local models of alterity. It argues that peripheral cannibal imagery helped shape intracultural identities and briefly enabled a shared, unstable form of intercultural communication between Europe and Japan.

Key findings

• European visual representations shifted: Hans Staden’s 1557 woodcuts showed him mingling with Tupinamba people, while Theodore de Bry’s 1590 illustrations removed anthropophagy from the encounter and used classical nudity to turn cannibalism into a detached spectacle.
• In Japan, Linschoten’s *Itinerario* maps likely arrived via the Dutch ship *De Liefde*, wrecked in 1600; Jesuit painting workshops adapted them into world-map folding screens, and *Bankoku sōzu* (1645) presented a world map with forty-two cartouches of peoples, placing Brazilians at the edge. Labels later shifted from *Barajiru* (“Brazil”) to *yamabito* (“mountain people”).
• The *Shuten Dōji* tale, originating in the fourteenth century, supplied a Japanese precedent for anthropophagy; Kanō Motonobu’s 1522 scroll relocated the ogre’s lair into Japanese architecture and was used as an heirloom for the 1594 marriage of Lady Toku and Ikeda Terumasa, while later versions often made demons the eaters or omitted the scene.
• The author proposes metonymy as the model: cannibals stand for all Others, and shared images of spectacular anthropophagy allowed Europe and Japan to briefly share a relational identity, though reproduction tamed the disruptive Other into display and entertainment.

Methods

• Narrative inquiry organized as three case studies: European travelogues about Brazilian tribes, Jesuit cartographic and visual propaganda in Japan, and the princess-eating ogre tale *Shuten Dōji*.
• Sources include Staden, Thevet, Léry, de Bry, Linschoten, Japanese folding screens, *Bankoku sōzu* and *Bankoku jinbutsu zu*, and *Shuten Dōji* scrolls, alongside secondary scholarship in art history, cartography, anthropology, and history.
• Analysis is comparative and interpretive, combining structuralist reading of visual motifs with a metonymic centre-periphery model of identity and Deleuze’s relational concept of identity.

Limitations

• No formal limitations section is stated in the paper.
• Evident from the text: the argument is largely interpretive and speculative at key points, with the author personally intervening when the fictional researchers do not answer a question and using formulations such as “I believe” and “might have.”
• Evident: the three case studies rely on visual and textual interpretation and secondary authorities rather than systematic evidence of audience reception or direct transmission; the intercultural communication model is proposed rather than tested.