Utagawa Kunitoshi

Utagawa Kunitoshi (歌川国利, 1847-1899) was a Meiji-era ukiyo-e printmaker whose work documents the rapid transformation of Tokyo and the Japanese state in the decades after the Restoration of 1868. A student of Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III), Kunitoshi belonged to the third generation of the Utagawa school's vast lineage of nineteenth-century print designers and was among the most prolific chroniclers of Meiji modernity, specialising in kaika-e (enlightenment pictures), Tokyo meisho-e (famous places), ceremonial subjects, and the new institutions of constitutional Japan.

Little biographical detail survives about Kunitoshi's early life beyond his birth in 1847, in the closing years of the Tokugawa period. He entered the studio of Utagawa Kunisada, the dominant figure of late-Edo print publishing, and on the master's death in 1865 continued his apprenticeship within the wider Utagawa circle. He sometimes also went by the personal name Inoue Yasuji and used the studio name Ipposai (一鵬斎). When the Meiji Restoration of 1868 toppled the Tokugawa shogunate and inaugurated a sweeping program of Westernisation, Kunitoshi was just entering his twenties, and the visual culture of the new state became the dominant subject of his mature career.

Kunitoshi's most characteristic output belongs to the genre of kaika-e — colourful single sheets and triptychs that depicted the symbols of bunmei kaika ("civilisation and enlightenment"), the slogan under which Meiji officials promoted Western industry, education, and political reform. He produced prints of horse-drawn trams on the Ginza, the Shimbashi railway terminus, brick-built Western-style buildings rising in the new commercial district, the iron Azuma and Ryōgoku bridges replacing their wooden Edo predecessors, and the steam ships and ironclads of the new Imperial Navy. These prints were produced in large editions for an urban audience eager to follow the visible transformation of their city, and they constitute one of the principal visual records of the early Meiji built environment.

Kunitoshi was also a leading designer of historical and ceremonial prints commemorating the great occasions of the new state. His triptychs of the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution in February 1889 — issued under such titles as "View of the Issuance of the Constitution" and "The National Diet of Japan" — are among the most widely reproduced visual records of that event, depicting the Emperor Meiji handing the constitutional document to Prime Minister Kuroda Kiyotaka before assembled court officials, military officers, and foreign diplomats. He produced similar prints of the inauguration of the new bicameral Diet in 1890, the great imperial processions of the period, and the celebrations of the Second National Industrial Exhibition. Alongside this official subject matter he also designed sumo prints, theatrical scenes, war prints from the Sino-Japanese conflict of 1894-95, and a continuing stream of meisho-e of Tokyo's famous places, especially the great religious sites of Asakusa and Ueno.