Change of the Capital to Tokyo (1868)

Change of the Capital to Tokyo (1868) is one of fifty manga paintings Kitazawa Rakuten produced in 1927 for the portfolio Manga Paintings of Sixty Years of History Since the Opening of the Country (Kaikoku rokujū-nen-shi manga-shū), a retrospective project organized by the Chūō Bijutsu Kyōkai and issued by subscription. Each artist in the project contributed two designs; Rakuten, then in his early fifties and recognized as the founding professional cartoonist of modern Japan, was assigned to depict two emblematic moments of the Meiji opening. This sheet pictures the 1868 transfer of the imperial capital from Kyoto to Edo, renamed Tokyo, when Emperor Meiji's progress to the new eastern capital became the most visible symbol of Restoration politics. Rakuten organizes the composition around the imperial palanquin, drawing the procession in his characteristic manga-painting idiom: a flat, restrained palette of ochre, indigo and vermillion against the cream of the paper, supple ink contour rather than woodblock keyblock, and a deliberately cartoonish exaggeration of posture that converts a state ceremony into a comically peopled tableau. The format—roughly 30 by 42 centimeters on a single sheet—was chosen so the fifty paintings could be bound and circulated as a portable comic history of modern Japan. The Honolulu Museum of Art holds the complete portfolio (accession 2018-14-01.01 for this sheet), one of very few full sets outside Japan, and the image is documented in their online collection and on Wikimedia Commons as a public-domain work. The sheet is a useful index of how Rakuten thought about the manga-painting as a serious historical medium: not the political weekly cartoon of his Tokyo Puck years, but a longer, denser, more reflective form aimed at narrating sixty years of national change for readers who had lived through them.