Yoshida Hambei

Yoshida Hambei (吉田半兵衛, also romanised Hanbei, active c. 1664-1689) was the dominant book illustrator of late seventeenth-century Kyoto and one of the most prolific designers of the early ukiyo-e movement. Working in the decades that bridged the Kanbun (1661-1673), Enpō (1673-1681), and Tenna-Jōkyō (1681-1688) eras - the formative period of Japanese commercial publishing - Hambei produced illustrations for more than one hundred books and was the figure most closely associated with the rise of the Kyoto-Osaka ehon (illustrated-book) trade.

Almost nothing is known about Hambei's biography beyond what can be inferred from his signed and attributed work. He was based in Kyoto, where the post-Genroku publishing industry had begun to coalesce around the city's established network of woodblock-cutting and printing workshops, and he appears to have worked in close partnership with the publishers Hachimonjiya, Yamazaki Ichibei, Fukaeya Tarōbei, and others who supplied the Kamigata (Kyoto-Osaka) market with novels, encyclopaedias, conduct manuals, religious texts, and ghost stories. He is sometimes identified as a pupil of Hishikawa Moronobu (1618-1694), the great Edo book illustrator whose career ran in parallel - and the two figures are conventionally treated together as the leading ehon designers of their generation, with Moronobu dominating the Edo market and Hambei the Kamigata.

Hambei is most celebrated today for his decade-long collaboration with the novelist Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693), whose tales of merchant townsmen, courtesans, and warrior love affairs defined the late-seventeenth-century kana-zōshi and ukiyo-zōshi literary genres. Hambei illustrated many of Saikaku's most important books, including Budō denraiki (Transmission of the Martial Arts, 1687), Nippon eitaigura (Japan's Treasury for the Ages, 1688), Nanshoku ōkagami (The Great Mirror of Male Love, 1687), Kōshoku gonin onna (Five Women Who Loved Love, 1686), and Saikaku oridome (Saikaku's Last Pieces, 1694, posthumous). The Saikaku-Hambei partnership produced some of the most enduring visual records of late-seventeenth-century Japanese popular literature; Hambei's compositions established the iconography of merchant-class genre - the carp-flag pole, the kotatsu charcoal brazier, the geta sandals and brushed-back hair of urban townsmen - that would shape Japanese pictorial culture for a century.

Beyond his Saikaku work, Hambei illustrated an extensive range of practical and educational publications. His Joyō kinmō zui (Illustrated Encyclopedia for Women, 1687) supplied seventeenth-century Japanese women with a graphic encyclopaedia covering textile patterns, household implements, lacquerware, hairstyles, court dress, regional speciality products, classical poetry, and the names of plants and birds - a vast visual reference work organised by theme that became one of the most-reprinted Edo-period encyclopaedias. His Kōshoku kinmōzui (Illustrated Encyclopedia of Love), Shin Otogi Bōko (1683, ghost-story compendium), Tōryū onna yō kagami (Mirror of Contemporary Women's Customs), and other practical compendia gave the seventeenth-century Kamigata reading public the visual vocabulary by which urban life, leisure, and material culture were registered in printed form.