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Edutainment > Articles on Art > Edo to Meiji > From Protest to Participation: Politics and the Meiji Popular Print

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Yoshitoshi

Moon of the Lonely House
by Yoshitoshi, 1890

This article series outlines roughly 120 years of Japanese printmaking from the Edo period under the Tokugawa shogunate until the Westernization of Japan during the Meiji era. The article describes the development of the popular Japanese print as the result of the political, social and economic environment of the times in which they were made and the people for whom they were produced.

Part nine takes a closer look at Yoshitoshi, today considered as the greatest artist of the Meiji period. And it was properly him who hardly fit into the new era of Meiji enlightenment - with his backward-looking subjects and his unpleasant scenes full of blood and perversities.

Warrior Prints ...

Yoshitoshi's specialty was in fact warrior prints, a late-coming genre to ukiyo-e that has been said to express the increasing uneasiness and sense of coming crisis felt by the Edo commoner in the final days of the bakufu.

... and 28 Murderers

Indeed, with eerie timing, the most extreme depiction of violence in the popular print came just before the collapse of the bakufu in 1868, in a gory, blood-splashed series called "28 Murderers" by Yoshitoshi and his fellow student Yoshiiku.

Though the series took Yoshitoshi to instant stardom at the time, his attempts to repeat the success with similarly violent scenes of historical warriors in the early Meiji years ended in utter failure.

More Enlightenment Please!

Yoshitoshi

Warriors in Battle
by Yoshitoshi

The print-buying audience no longer seemed interested in looking back at history, but ahead to the modern, enlightened future, the way to which led through the West, not old Japan. In this their tastes were clearly led by the national ideals of the time, just as they would be in the 1880's, when Yoshitoshi's historical prints of warriors became once again the toast of the print world, meeting neatly with the nationalistic desires of the populace, in a return to "Japanese tradition".

How did this happen? How did the desires of the general populace come to be the plaything of government policy, rather than that which resists and challenges it? The answer to this question is more complex than I can do justice to here, but at the heart of it must be a changed definition of "the people" by themselves, from commoners distinct from the class that rules them in the Tokugawa Period, to the "We the People" structure of the nation-state. But how could this transformation have happened so rapidly?

Meiji Government and the People

Clearly, this is related to the sense of crisis, both real and manipulated, at the beginning of the Meiji Period, a concern for the fate of a group in which the common man now shared an interest, as opposed to the bakufu government, in which he played no part, and for whom his welfare was never a real concern.

Of course the Meiji government was by no means democratic, but by eliminating the caste structure of the Tokugawa regime, its leaders made it possible for the common man to identify with them, while pretending to speak in his name, and for his sake.

The Common Bond of National Strength

Yoshitoshi

A Print Made for Yamato Newspaper
by Yoshitoshi, 1887

In short, the structure of resistance that had fueled popular culture in the Tokugawa Period was transformed into one of at least symbolic participation, and the government ideal of national strength thus became a goal that each member of the nation could strive for, for the good of him/herself, as well as for the others to whom he/she was now related.

Anything so backward-looking and unpleasant as Yoshitoshi's bloody warriors could serve no function in the attainment of this goal. Prints of civilization and enlightenment, to the contrary, were at least seen to share its end, focusing on the new, and providing an image and record of changing Japan.

Dan McKee

More about Yoshitoshi Tsukioka

Biography of Yoshitoshi Tsukioka
Bloody Yoshitoshi Prints
Dai Nippon Meisho Kagami
Fuzoku Sanjuniso
One Hundred Aspects of the Moon

The author, Dan McKee is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Japanese literature program at Cornell University, NY.  He has a Master of the Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University, as well as an M.A. from Cornell. Dan McKee is presently writing a dissertation on "surimono as a literary practice in nineteenth century Edo."

All copyrights for the text of this article are held by the author, rights on images are held by artelino GmbH. Text and images are for personal viewing purposes only and may not be copied or distributed without the prior permission of the author, respectively of artelino GmbH.

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Edo to Meiji