The Emperor Meiji and Empress in a Carriage during their Silver Wedding Anniversary Celebration at Aoyama

This Meiji woodblock print by Inoue Yasuji, documented at ukiyo-e.org, records a ceremonial procession in which the Emperor Meiji and Empress travel by carriage through Aoyama in connection with the imperial silver wedding anniversary celebration. The image belongs to the genre of kaika-e and reportage prints that flourished in Tokyo during the 1880s and 1890s, in which woodblock artists turned from kabuki actors and beauties toward state ceremony, military parades, and the visual furniture of constitutional monarchy. Yasuji places the imperial carriage at the center of the composition, surrounded by mounted attendants and ranked spectators, treating the event with the steady documentary attention that distinguishes his Tokyo views. The print sits within a wider body of Meiji prints in which the imperial couple, almost never depicted in Edo-period ukiyo-e, became a recurring subject as the court was made visible to citizens through public processions and illustrated newspapers. For collectors of Inoue Yasuji and Meiji woodblock prints generally, the sheet is significant because it ties one of the most accomplished Kiyochika-school landscape artists to the explicitly political project of imaging the new monarchy. The Aoyama setting is itself a marker of the period: the area was being redeveloped with imperial parade grounds and military facilities, and to depict the carriage moving through Aoyama was to depict the geography of the modern state taking shape on the western edge of Tokyo. As with most Yasuji prints, fine early impressions with clean colors are uncommon.