Women Imitating the Procession of a Korean Ambassador

Women Imitating the Procession of a Korean Ambassador, dated around 1797 by the Harvard Art Museums, is a striking late composition by Kitagawa Utamaro that draws on Edo's fascination with the Tsushinshi, the diplomatic embassies sent by Joseon Korea to the Tokugawa shogunate. These embassies were rare, elaborate processions that traveled overland to Edo and prompted intense civic interest, generating both official imagery and popular adaptations. Utamaro converts the male, foreign procession into a Yoshiwara mitate, a parody enacted by women in the licensed quarter, who substitute themselves for ambassadors, musicians and attendants. The conceit lets him exercise his command of Edo bijin-ga across a horizontal sequence of figures, differentiating each woman through robe pattern, instrument or implement while preserving the underlying portraiture of female types. As ukiyo-e, the print captures the way the floating world absorbed and reinterpreted foreign and official spectacle, turning even diplomacy into material for playful imitation. The composition emphasizes movement, with the figures arranged in procession and angled so that the eye follows from one to the next, recreating the cadence of the original event. Color choices and patterning suggest both the formality of the embassy and the licensed quarter's appetite for color and ornament. The Harvard sheet stands as evidence of how ukiyo-e served as a porous medium between Edo and the wider world it imagined, with Utamaro using such inventive parodies to extend the imaginative range of his bijin-ga practice.