Yamazaki Toshinobu

Yamazaki Toshinobu (山崎年信, 1857-1886) was a Meiji-period ukiyo-e printmaker and newspaper illustrator whose short career placed him at the center of one of the most consequential transitions in the history of Japanese popular printing. He came of age during the years when the woodblock industry of the late Edo period was being absorbed into the new mass media of the Meiji era, and his work spans both the inherited conventions of nineteenth-century ukiyo-e and the emerging genres of war reportage, newspaper insert prints, and illustrated chronicles of contemporary events. He died at only twenty-eight or twenty-nine, leaving behind a remarkably concentrated body of work that documents the political and military upheavals of Japan's first two decades of modernization.

Toshinobu was born in Edo (modern Tokyo) in 1857, the closing years of the Tokugawa shogunate, to a family of modest means; his father was a greengrocer. He entered the studio of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), the most original and influential ukiyo-e master of the Meiji period, while still a teenager, reportedly around the age of thirteen. From Yoshitoshi he received the toshi character that became the first element of his go (artist's name), as well as his training in the dramatic figural composition and historical narrative subjects for which the Yoshitoshi atelier became famous. Some sources also place him briefly within the wider Utagawa-school orbit that descended from Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1865), though it is the Yoshitoshi connection that defines his artistic identity. He is sometimes called Yamazaki Toshinobu I to distinguish him from a later artist of the same name (Yamazaki Toshinobu II, 1866-1903); the I designation belongs to the figure who died in 1886.

His career, beginning around 1877, coincided with two of the defining events of early Meiji Japan: the Satsuma Rebellion and the rapid expansion of the newspaper industry. The Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, in which the disaffected samurai of Satsuma province rose under the leadership of Saigō Takamori against the centralizing Meiji government, gave Toshinobu his first great subject. He produced approximately thirty woodblock prints documenting the campaign, from the initial uprising at Kagoshima through the climactic battles at Kumamoto Castle, the rebels' retreat across Kyushu, and the final defeat at Shiroyama in September 1877. These prints helped fix the iconography of Saigō and his commanders in Meiji popular imagination, and they range from triumphal scenes of imperial forces in action to the commemorative composition showing the rebel leader's severed head presented to Prince Arisogawa Taruhito, today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

From 1878 onward Toshinobu became increasingly identified with nishiki-e shinbun, the lavishly colored woodblock prints inserted into newspapers as visual supplements to the printed text. The most important of these were the prints he produced for the Tokyo paper Chōya shimbun, a leading organ of political journalism in the early Meiji period. The Chōya shimbun insert prints, which the British Museum still holds in significant numbers, treated imperial ceremonies, sensational crimes, military and naval events, and the new Western customs transforming daily life in Tokyo. Toshinobu's nishiki-e shinbun helped establish the visual vocabulary of Meiji journalism at the moment when illustrated newspapers were becoming the primary source of public information.