Imperial Family at Shito Shrine

Imperial Family at Shito Shrine is a Meiji-era ceremonial print by Inoue Yasuji that records a formal visit by members of the imperial household to a Shinto shrine, part of the broader Meiji program of foregrounding the throne in public ritual. Inoue Yasuji places the procession beneath the shrine's great torii, with officials in court dress, accompanying retainers, and a ranked audience of onlookers organized along clear perspectival lines that owe much to his training under Kobayashi Kiyochika. While his best-known kosen-ga sheets dwell on twilight rivers and lamp-lit streets, here he tunes the same atmospheric vocabulary to daylight ceremony: [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations soften the sky and shrine forest, while crisp keyblock work articulates regalia, banners, and architectural detail. Imperial occasion prints of this kind were a recognized subset of Meiji prints, sold to households eager for legible images of state ritual and to a press market that did not yet rely on photographs. Although the design does not belong to Inoue Yasuji's Tokyo Famous Places landscape series, it shares that project's documentary instincts and its insistence on the modernizing capital as a stage for public events. The [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org archive preserves this impression, providing scholars and collectors with a reference image for studies of how Inoue Yasuji extended kosen-ga technique into the iconography of the early Meiji throne.