Edutainment > From Protest to Participation: Politics and the Meiji Popular Print

  <  Part Seven: Fushi-ga, Period of Satire  >  

Kids Mocking a Feudal Parade
by Kyosai Kawanabe, ca. 1863

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 seven covers the final years of the Tokugawa bakufu. The old order was too weak for either reforms or brute oppression. The economic and social decline of the country were the inevitable consequences. During this period a new print genre was created due to demand by the public - fushi-ga, satire prints.

Too Weak for Reforms - Too Strong to Die

The last fifteen years of the Edo Period, after the failure of the Tempo Reforms to effect lasting change, was a time in which print artists were essentially free to run amuck in open satire and political criticism of an unprecedented manner.

Throughout the censorship period (1842-1852) print makers had continually tested the waters, becoming increasingly open in their flaunting of the reforms. Kabuki depiction had progressed from historical scenes with actors as heroes to flagrant stage depictions complete with props and musicians, marked only with the "shita-uri" seal that meant such prints were not to be displayed openly in shops, where they might receive the notice of an official.

The Upright Kuniyoshi

Minamoto-no-Yoritomo
by Kuniyoshi, ca. 1845

Once such victories had been won, print makers, particularly those who had suffered in the early days of the reforms, began to unleash vehement and direct criticisms against the government. Utagawa Kuniyoshi, perhaps the most imaginative breaker of the reforms, led the way early with an 1843 triptych of Minamoto Yoritomo dreaming of monsters. Rumor quickly spread that the sleeping Yoritomo represented the shogun, one of the four guardians by his side the leader of the reforms, Mizuno Tadakuni, and the monsters members of the populace who had been angered by them - in short, a popular uprising. Kuniyoshi denied that he had intended such a statement, and escaped punishment, though the blocks for the print and unsold copies were destroyed.

Satire Prints - a New Market

What was clear from the incident, however, is that the print audience desired satire, and were ready to read it into almost anything the print designers produced. And the designers, as always, did not hesitate to live up to the demand. Though satire was still dangerous, and did not go punished when discovered, Kuniyoshi and his students continued to supply it.

Kuniyoshi dared to design a parody of the new shogun and his administration as figures from Otsu-e; Yoshitora an image of four warriors making mochi that played on the "easy work" of the founder of the Tokugawa house; while Sadahide's "Warriors of the Present Age" appear as empty armor and decrepit old men.

Though the bakufu fined these artists and their publishers, it was too busy with domestic, and then unprecedented international crises, to pay much attention to what popular print makers were doing. Taking advantage of the increasing discontent of the urban commoner and the inability of the bakufu to stop them, publishers began to risk commentaries on contemporary events, and introduced a new genre of print in the final years of the Tokugawa Period, the so-called fushi-ga or satire picture.

Those Strange Fushi-ga

Fushi-ga
artist unknown, ca. 1850

The fushi-ga of the 1860's were an unprecedented phenomenon in the world of the popular print. Depicting neither celebrities nor historical figures, emblematic landscapes nor luxurious interiors, the typical fushi-ga would show a number of unremarkable figures engaging in an everyday activity, their spoken exclamations written beside them on the print. The fushi-ga was therefore something like a non-erotic shunga, but differed from all previous forms of the popular print in relying more on text than on image for effect - and therefore has been virtually ignored by Western critics of the print. To the extent that the watered-down Utagawa School figural depiction in these prints is so stereotypical as to erase all signs of artistic individuality, these prints are indeed negligible as art.

Many of them are not even signed, and many that are bear the signatures of minor artists whose work is not seen in other genres. Considering this anonymity of style and signature, the speculation that the fushi-ga may have been the product of more famous artists attempting to conceal their identity is worthy of speculation. For the fushi-ga tread on dangerous ground, explicitly criticizing political figures and the social situation of the times.

One pair of prints shows a group of representative Japanese figures grinding sesame under the gaze of a foreign overseer, others comment on the disasters of the time, Perry's Black Ships of 1852, the great earthquake of 1854, the measles epidemic of 1858, seeing these not as random events, but signs of something surely wrong in the political world.

It's the Text that Counts

But the real bite of these prints was not usually in the images themselves, rather in the text they illustrated. An ordinary-looking picture of Edoites flying kites could thus be transformed into a sharp commentary on inflation, with the kites bearing the names of basic commodities, and the text complaining about how things are going up and up. In prints like these, we have clear evidence of the dissatisfaction with the bakufu and the state of society in the late Tokugawa Period, signals that the populace was ready for a change that bordered on, without ever explicitly advocating, revolution.

Such a record of the friction between the popular print and political authority in the Tokugawa Period would seem to suggest a certain democratic - or perhaps even anarchistic - impulse in popular culture, a fundamental resistance to control from above. Popular print culture from the first gave little credence to the official worldview and morality of the Tokugawa bakufu, presenting its own hedonistic values of pleasure and luxury as an attractive alternative.

Attempts by the bakufu to limit and control the print had some success, but the stricter the attempts at control, the more the print makers resisted, ultimately developing a complex language between themselves and the print-buying public that allowed for defiance of restrictions on the popular form.

The Final Stage of Tokugawa Bakufu

By the final years of the Tokugawa Period, this resistance was no longer veiled in historical parallels or symbolic monsters, but quite open in satires and parodies of contemporary events. To this extent, the print could even be said to be a potentially revolutionary form, though it put forth no ideal political alternative to the system it criticized, and its interests were always for the comfort and security of its audience, not for changing the world.

Yet what a contrast between the Edo printmakers resistance to political authority, and the apparent capitulation of printmakers to government and national ends in the subsequent Meiji Era. How did the popular print go from warring with the government to supporting its wars, from satirizing figures of authority to lauding them with flattering portraits?

If the popular print, as I have attempted to show, represents not merely the point of view of an artist or publisher, but necessarily corresponding values among the common people, then we cannot understand this change as simply forced from above, even by the new Meiji government itself.

What we must look for, rather, is a change in the people and their definition of themselves, particularly in relation to government, that could allow for such a major reversal of attitudes.

Dan McKee

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