The practice of forcing suspected Christians, and eventually most heads of households, to step on a Christian representation (known as the "fumi-e" or "imaged for stomping") began after the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637-38. This uprising was the first challenge to the Tokugawa Shogunate after the elimination of the Toyotomi at the Sieges of Osaka Castle of 1614-15. The Tokugawa response to Shimabara, in which a small peasant uprising grew into a larger rebellion with participation by local "hidden Christian" farmers as well as discontented samurai, consisted of an overwhelming show of force. The shogunate dispatched an army of 150,000 soldiers to lay siege to the rebel-occupied castle, and though the siege took several months, eventually most of the 23,000 or so rebels were slaughtered. The Tokugawa instituted the fumi-e practice in the wake of this crisis, and it was one of many policies--including the system of alternate attendance, the status system, and the strict regulation of borders and migration--that allowed the government to successfully maintain power until the mid-19th century.

Surprisingly little has been written about fumi-e in English, though one helpful source is Thomas DaCosta Kaurmann, "Interpreting Cultural Transfer and the Consequences of Markets and Exchange: Reconsidering Fumi-e," in Artistic and Cultural Exchanges between Europe and Asia, 1400-1900, ed. Michael North (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2010), 135–162. In Japanese some good sources include: Kataoka Yakichi, Fumi-e: Kinkyo no rekishi, Tokyo, 1969 (片岡弥吉、『踏絵:禁教の歴史』、日本放送出版協会、1969) and Shimada Yakichi and Shimada Yuriko, Fumi-e: Gaikoku-jin ni yoru Fumi-e no Kiroku, Tokyo 1994 (島田孝右、島田ゆり子、『踏み絵:外国人 による踏み絵の記録』、雄松堂出版、1994).