A Year of Abundance and Prosperity in the Reign (Hôsai miyo no sakae): Sumô Matches Held in the Presence of the Emperor

Sumo Matches Held in the Presence of the Emperor is a triptych from Inoue Yasuji's commemorative series A Year of Abundance and Prosperity in the Reign (Hosai miyo no sakae), a set of imperial occasion prints that contributed to the official iconography of the early Meiji court. The design records a tenran-zumo, a sumo tournament staged in the imperial presence, with the emperor and his retinue seated under a curtained canopy at right, court officials and foreign guests ranged along the gallery, and the dohyo at center where the wrestlers face off before the gyoji. Inoue Yasuji, working in the kosen-ga vocabulary he developed under Kobayashi Kiyochika, applies disciplined perspectival recession to the audience galleries and uses crisp keyblock lines to articulate the wrestlers' anatomy, while reserving bokashi gradations for the canopy textiles and the dust around the ring. Imperial event prints of this kind were a recognized genre of Meiji prints, marketed both as souvenirs of specific ceremonies and as visual instruction in the new public role of the throne. While the sheet falls outside Inoue Yasuji's Tokyo Famous Places landscape work, it shares the series' commitment to careful observation and to translating a contemporary spectacle into a legible documentary image. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston preserves this impression, where it stands as evidence of how Inoue Yasuji extended kosen-ga techniques from cityscape into court ceremonial, broadening the range of subjects available to late nineteenth-century woodblock artists.