Yanone Arrow Head (variant 3)

Yanone Arrow Head, in this third recorded variant, is an undated Taishō or early Shōwa print by Hasegawa Sadanobu III (1881-1963), preserved on ukiyo-e.org (https://ukiyo-e.org/image/wbp/835718989). The subject is the kabuki dance-drama Yanone, one of the Kabuki Jūhachiban canonized as the signature repertoire of the Ichikawa Danjūrō line, in which the youthful Soga Gorō Tokimune sharpens a giant arrowhead in preparation for the Soga revenge attack on Kudō Suketsune. The role is among the great aragoto bravura parts: a static posed tableau, red-and-white kumadori makeup, an enormous prop arrowhead, and an outsize sword stand defining the visual language. As third head of the Hasegawa Osaka-Kyoto print house, Sadanobu III inherited a Kansai late-ukiyo-e workshop tradition specialized in theatrical subjects; the Yanone design is one of the workshop's recurring Jūhachiban images. The present variant carries the same single-figure isolation against a plain ground as the workshop's other Yanone designs, suggesting either a fresh impression from the same blocks or a re-cut version produced for continued circulation across the Taishō and early Shōwa years. The presence of multiple variants in the ukiyo-e.org records (including the companion under wbp/796941966) reflects the workshop's standard practice of keeping a small core theatrical repertoire — Yanone, Shibaraku, and a handful of other Jūhachiban subjects — in active production through the interwar period. The ukiyo-e.org record carries the sheet as a Sadanobu III print without museum-level cataloguing, but the unmistakable iconography and the workshop pattern together place it within the Hasegawa Kansai yakusha-e idiom of the 1910s through early 1930s.