Death of Professor Fukuzawa Yukichi (1901)

Death of Professor Fukuzawa Yukichi (1901), a companion sheet to Change of the Capital to Tokyo from the same 1927 portfolio Manga Paintings of Sixty Years of History Since the Opening of the Country, is Kitazawa Rakuten's personal tribute to the educator and Westernizer Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901), founder of Keio University and of the Jiji Shinpō newspaper. The subject was a meaningful choice: Rakuten had joined Fukuzawa's Jiji Shinpō in 1899 as a staff cartoonist, and it was on that paper's Sunday supplement Jiji Manga that he produced the comic strips—Tagosaku to Mokube no Tōkyō Kenbutsu, Chame to Dekobō, and others—that anchored his early reputation. By 1901 Rakuten was still a young man, twenty-five years old, and Fukuzawa's death must have registered as the loss of a teacher and patron as well as a public figure. Twenty-six years later he commemorates that moment in the dignified, slightly satirical manga-painting style that defines the portfolio: a domestic interior with mourners arrayed around the great educator's bier, brushwork loose enough to retain the cartoonist's freedom while restrained enough to honor the subject. The palette stays in the muted ochres, slate greys and indigos characteristic of the series, and Rakuten's draftsmanship of figures and faces, descended from the caricatural energy of his Tokyo Puck political work, finds a quieter register here. The Honolulu Museum of Art holds the sheet (accession 2018-14-01.21), measuring approximately 30 by 42 centimeters, as part of its complete set of the portfolio; the image is documented in public-domain form on Wikimedia Commons.