Jichōsai (Niwa Tōkei)

Jichōsai (耳鳥斎, also romanized Nichōsai; active c. 1781-1804) was an Osaka caricaturist and illustrated-book designer whose witty, abbreviated brush manner stands as the most distinctive comic idiom produced in Kamigata (the Osaka-Kyoto region) during the late eighteenth century. Little is known of his life — even the reading of his art-name, 耳鳥斎, is contested between Jichōsai and Nichōsai, and no firm birth or death dates have ever been established — but the dozen or so woodblock-printed books and painted handscrolls attributed to him form one of the clearest bridges between the Heian-derived tradition of toba-e cartooning and the giga (comic picture) tradition that flourished in nineteenth-century Osaka.

Most sources describe him as a sake merchant or sake-shop proprietor in Osaka who painted and drew on the side, taking up the medium as an amateur in the manner of the Osaka literati of his generation. He is said to have studied independently the brush idioms of Toba Sōjō — the twelfth-century abbot traditionally credited with the Chōjū-jinbutsu giga handscrolls — and of the early Edo painter Hanabusa Itchō, whose comic figure manner he reworked into a recognizably Kamigata key. Most twentieth-century cataloguers place his working career within the An'ei, Tenmei, and Kansei eras (roughly 1772-1801), with the bulk of his published books appearing between 1780 and 1805.

His printed output is dominated by ehon (picture books) and gafu (painting albums) of caricature: rapid brush sketches of kabuki actors, sumo wrestlers, sake-drinkers, monks, courtesans, blind shampooers, street performers, and the small comic types of Osaka urban life, rendered with extravagantly simplified contours, exaggerated facial features, and a fluid, deliberately rough brush line. The 1780 E-hon mizu ya sora (Picture book of water and sky) and the 1781 E wa Jichosai (Pictures are Jichōsai) established the program; later titles such as Tobaye ōgi no mato (Toba-e fan target, c. 1788), Tsurezure sui ga kawa (1792), Saiji meppokai katsura kasane (1803), and Ehon kototsugai (1805) extended it, the last appearing the year after he is generally thought to have stopped working. The books are uniformly cut and printed in Osaka, often by craftsmen associated with the Kamigata kabuki-print trade, and circulated through the local market alongside the contemporary Kamigata actor prints of Ryūkōsai Jokei and the early Shōkōsai Hanbei.

Beyond the printed books, his most celebrated single work is the Chūshingura emaki (Chūshingura picture scroll), a handscroll selecting episodes from the kabuki play Kanadehon Chūshingura and recasting them in his light, eccentric, deliberately comic manner. The British Museum holds the principal version of the scroll (registration 1881,1210,0.272), and the Honolulu Museum of Art holds a substantial body of his single-sheet figure designs of c. 1780 (museum nos. 10528-10537), depicting kabuki actor types — Yamashina Jinkichi, Issun Tokubei, Mikawaya Giheiji, Tengawaya Gihei, Adahiya Tōbei, Onoue Sōkurō, Ukiyo Matabei, Kenkaya Gorōemon, Danshichi Kurobei — in the abbreviated giga idiom that defined his reputation. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art all hold multiple copies of his ehon, and Western sinological libraries from the British Museum to the Bibliothèque nationale de France preserve further sets, evidence of the books' wide circulation through the late-nineteenth-century Japonisme trade.