Migita Toshihide

Migita Toshihide (右田年英, 1863-1925) was a Meiji-period ukiyo-e and nihonga painter best known today for his historical narrative prints, his bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women), and above all for his extensive output of senso-e (war prints) chronicling Japan's two great late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century conflicts: the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. Working at the intersection of traditional woodblock printing and the new visual journalism of the Meiji era, Toshihide bridged the late Edo print tradition he had inherited from his teacher Tsukioka Yoshitoshi and the modernizing visual culture of Imperial Japan.

Toshihide was born in 1863 in Usuki, in Bungo Province (present-day Oita Prefecture, Kyushu), the closing years of the Tokugawa shogunate. His given name was Migita Tashichi; he later adopted Toshihide as an artist name and signed many of his prints with the studio name Bunyo Choro (豊洋楼主) or Hosen Choro, references that have led modern catalogers to group some of his major bijin-ga and historical series under the Bunyo Choro label. As a young man he traveled to Tokyo in pursuit of an artistic career, and in the early 1880s he entered the studio of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), then the leading ukiyo-e designer of the Meiji period and famous for his ambitious historical and supernatural series such as One Hundred Aspects of the Moon. Toshihide became one of Yoshitoshi's most prolific students alongside Toshikata Mizuno, Toshiaki Toshikata's contemporaries, and the small group of Yoshitoshi pupils who carried late-Edo print traditions into the late Meiji era. From Yoshitoshi he absorbed a taste for dramatic narrative subjects, an emphasis on facial and gestural expression, and the carefully drawn line that distinguishes the best work of the school.

After completing his apprenticeship, Toshihide built a varied career as an illustrator, print designer, and painter. He worked extensively for the Tokyo illustrated newspapers (shinbun nishiki-e) that flourished in the 1880s and 1890s, designing front-page illustrations for periodicals such as the Yamato Shinbun, and he contributed novel and serial illustrations that reached a wide popular audience. He also produced book illustrations for late-Meiji editions of classical historical literature, including chapters from the Taiheiki, Heike Monogatari, and tales drawn from the Soga revenge cycle, which were treated as sources for prints across his career. Many of his single-sheet historical prints reuse the kind of subject matter that had been canonical for Yoshitoshi: heroic moments from medieval warfare, Noh and kabuki episodes, supernatural confrontations, and exemplary deeds of valor.

The defining body of Toshihide's career, however, is his senso-e. When war with Qing China broke out in July 1894, Tokyo publishers responded with an enormous burst of woodblock prints depicting the conflict in oban triptych format, and Toshihide became one of the most active and most accomplished designers in the genre. Working for publishers including Matsuki Heikichi (Daikokuya), Akiyama Buemon, Sasaki Toyokichi, and Katada Chojiro, he produced dozens of triptychs covering the major engagements of 1894-95: the naval action off Phungdo, the land battle at Songhwan, the assault on Pyongyang, the naval battle of the Yellow Sea, the landing at Lushun (Port Arthur) and the eventual surrender of the Chinese admiral Ding Ruchang at Weihaiwei. His Sino-Japanese War prints combine the vigorous figure drawing he had learned from Yoshitoshi with new pictorial conventions adapted from Western reportorial illustration: foreshortened modern weaponry, smoke and explosion effects, uniformed Japanese troops shown in disciplined formation, and Chinese forces typically depicted in retreat or surrender. Heroic individual soldiers and officers are often named in the cartouches, giving the prints the character of illustrated war reportage as much as decorative imagery. Major Sino-Japanese War triptychs by Toshihide are now held by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the British Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, among other institutions that built war-print collections in the twentieth century.

A decade later, when the Russo-Japanese War broke out in February 1904, Toshihide returned to the senso-e format, although by then the woodblock medium was in clear decline as a journalistic vehicle, increasingly supplanted by lithography, photography, and the illustrated magazines. His Russo-Japanese War prints depict the naval action off Port Arthur, torpedo boat actions in February 1904, hand-to-hand combat at the Yalu River, and the operations on land at Liaoyang and Mukden. They form part of the last great wave of traditional Japanese war prints and are studied today as documents both of late ukiyo-e production and of the visual propaganda that accompanied Japan's emergence as a modern military power. His series Records of the Russo-Japanese War (Nichiro kosen kibun) and related single sheets are represented in collections at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the British Museum, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and other institutions.

Alongside his war prints, Toshihide produced an important body of bijin-ga, most prominently the series Bijin juni sugata (Twelve Aspects of Beauties) and Bijin juni so (Twelve Figures of Beauties), which assigned a single beauty to each month of the lunar calendar and named her with the corresponding traditional month name: Kisaragi (second month), Fuzuki (seventh month), Hazuki (eighth month), Nagatsuki (ninth month), Kannazuki (tenth month), Shimotsuki (eleventh month), and the rest. These prints, signed with the Bunyo Choro studio name, combine the elegant Meiji bijin idiom of his contemporary Toyohara Chikanobu with subtle seasonal accessories—fans, umbrellas, autumn leaves, snow-bordered kimono—and are now held in groups at the British Museum and other institutions with Meiji print holdings. He also produced yakusha-e (kabuki actor prints) and Noh subjects, notably his images of the warrior Benkei on the boat (Funa Benkei) and the demon-dancer Hojo Takatoki summoning tengu, in the late 1890s.

Toshihide's later career was shifted increasingly toward nihonga painting and book illustration as the woodblock print industry contracted. He continued to exhibit and to take commissions through the Taisho era, and he was active in the Tokyo art world as a member of artists' associations and as a teacher of younger illustrators. He died in 1925 at the age of sixty-two.

For much of the twentieth century, Migita Toshihide was overshadowed in Western collections by the more famous senso-e designers Kobayashi Kiyochika and Ogata Gekko, but recent scholarship—particularly the catalogues produced for major war-print exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Sainsbury Institute, and Brown University's Lafcadio Hearn collection—has restored his standing as one of the most prolific and visually inventive war-print designers of the Meiji period. His historical narrative prints have also drawn renewed attention as late examples of the Yoshitoshi school's commitment to legendary and dramatic subjects, and his Bunyo Choro bijin-ga are now recognized as a distinctive contribution to Meiji bijin design. Together, his battlefield triptychs, his bijin series, his Noh and kabuki sheets, and his book illustrations document the final flowering of ukiyo-e as it adapted to a Japan that was simultaneously industrializing, modernizing its army and navy, and asserting itself as a major power in East Asia.