Yanone Arrow Head (variant 4)

Yanone Arrow Head, in this fourth 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/860144751). The subject is again the kabuki dance-drama Yanone, one of the Kabuki Jūhachiban, first staged by Ichikawa Danjūrō II in 1729, in which the youthful Soga Gorō Tokimune sharpens a giant arrowhead in preparation for the Soga revenge attack against Kudō Suketsune. The role is a defining aragoto bravura part — static posed tableau, red-and-white kumadori makeup, outsize prop arrowhead — that translates with unusual graphic clarity into a single-figure yakusha-e format. The number of recorded Yanone variants attached to the Sadanobu III name on ukiyo-e.org (the present sheet and the companions under wbp/796941966 and wbp/835718989) is unusual and reflects the workshop's standard practice during the Taishō and early Shōwa years: a small core theatrical repertoire of canonized Jūhachiban subjects was kept in continuous circulation, with the blocks reissued, re-cut, or recolored as required to satisfy demand from Kansai connoisseurs and from the foreign collector market through Osaka, Kyoto, and Yokohama dealers. As third head of the Hasegawa Osaka-Kyoto print house, Sadanobu III sustained that workshop pattern, and the Yanone design — along with Shibaraku and the warrior subjects — is among the easiest to identify across his recorded output. The ukiyo-e.org record carries the impression as a Sadanobu III print without museum-level cataloguing, but the unmistakable iconography and the workshop pattern locate it firmly within the Hasegawa Kansai yakusha-e idiom of the interwar years.