Emperor Nintoku Visits His Palace in the City of Naniwa (Nintoku tennō Naniwa-to gosho e miyuki no zu)

This 1868 Museum of Fine Arts Boston print by Hasegawa Sadanobu II (signed as Konobu) depicts the legendary fifth-century Emperor Nintoku visiting his palace in Naniwa, the ancient name for what is now Osaka. The print appeared in the inaugural year of the Meiji Restoration, when Osaka and Kyoto designers were drawing on Japan's pre-Tokugawa imperial past to legitimize the new political order that had displaced the shogunate. Emperor Nintoku was a particularly resonant subject in early Meiji Osaka: a sovereign celebrated in the eighth-century Nihon Shoki chronicles for surveying his city from a high tower, observing that few houses emitted cooking smoke, and remitting taxes for three years so that his subjects could prosper — a parable of imperial benevolence that early Meiji intellectuals invoked to frame the Restoration as a return to ideal monarchical governance. Sadanobu II's composition places the procession in a Naniwa-located historical setting, with court costume, formal palace architecture, and ceremonial retinue drawn from the historicizing conventions of nineteenth-century Japanese painting. The print contributes to the visual rhetoric of the early Meiji moment, when Osaka was being reframed from a mere mercantile city to a site of imperial dignity. The MFA Boston copy (sc156079) entered the museum through its strong early-twentieth-century Japanese print acquisitions.