Morikawa Chikashige

Morikawa Chikashige (守川周重, active c. 1869-1882) was a Meiji-era ukiyo-e print designer in Tokyo whose specialty was yakusha-e, the actor portrait, and whose career maps almost exactly onto the first decade and a half of the Meiji period. His exact birth and death dates are not recorded, but the signed body of work he left behind, well over one hundred kabuki triptychs along with smaller numbers of bijin-ga, kaika-e (enlightenment prints), newspaper illustrations, and book frontispieces, places him among the most prolific Tokyo actor-print designers of the 1870s and very early 1880s.

Chikashige trained as a pupil of Toyohara Kunichika (1835-1900), the leading kabuki print designer of the early Meiji era. The Kunichika studio, based in Tokyo and tightly connected to the city's commercial publishers, was at the center of the Meiji yakusha-e trade, and Chikashige's training gave him both the visual vocabulary of late-Edo actor portraiture and access to the publishers who supplied the kabuki theaters of the new capital with souvenir prints. His earliest signed works appear from around 1869, just after the political settlement of the Meiji Restoration, and he continued to design prints steadily through 1881 and into early 1882. After that date he disappears from the documentary record. The conventional shorthand "active 1869-1882" reflects this signed-output evidence rather than confirmed biographical dates.

His chosen medium was the ōban triptych, the three-sheet horizontal format that had become the dominant vehicle for staged kabuki scenes in the late Edo period and that continued to dominate Meiji yakusha-e. The triptych allowed an entire stage tableau to unfold across the unfolded sheets, with central protagonists framed by supporting actors, painted backdrops, and the elaborate prop architecture characteristic of mid-Meiji kabuki productions. Chikashige's triptychs typically identify individual actors by name in the inscriptions and depict them in the costume and pose of specific roles in identified plays, a convention that made the prints function as both visual souvenirs and a kind of theatrical reference work for Edo audiences who attended performances at the Shintomi-za, Ichimura-za, Haruki-za, Kotobuki-za, and the other principal kabuki houses of Tokyo.

Chikashige's prints are visually distinguished by the strong, sometimes raw use of aniline dyes, the synthetic pigments imported from Germany and England that flooded the Japanese print market from the late 1860s onward and that defined the palette of early Meiji ukiyo-e. Brilliant magentas, acid greens, and saturated purples replaced or supplemented the older mineral and plant-based colorants of Edo-period printing, producing the high-contrast, slightly garish look that contemporary collectors associate with Meiji actor prints. Aniline reds in particular tended to bleed and darken over time, and Chikashige's surviving works show varying degrees of this characteristic chromatic shift. The publishers who issued his prints, including Yokoyama Ryōhachi (often signed in inscriptions as Yokoyama Bun'emon) and others in the cluster of Tokyo print firms that catered to the kabuki market, supplied the technically demanding multi-block color separations that aniline printing required.