Tokyo Puck Cover, April 1905

This Tokyo Puck (Tōkyō Pakku) cover from April 15, 1905 belongs to the inaugural issues of the magazine Kitazawa Rakuten founded that month and would edit through 1915. April 1905 placed the launch in the closing months of the Russo-Japanese War, and the satirical weekly's first numbers carried a politically charged tone, lampooning both domestic factions and the major world powers as Japan's military victories were being reported. Rakuten had spent the previous decade absorbing the conventions of the Anglo-American political cartoon—first under Frank Arthur Nankivell at the Yokohama-based Box of Curios from 1895, then through Fukuzawa Yukichi's Jiji Shinpō from 1899, where he produced the Sunday Jiji Manga strips that introduced sequential newspaper comics to Japanese readers. Tokyo Puck was his attempt to give that imported political-cartoon idiom a dedicated Japanese-language vehicle, modeled directly on the New York Puck and on the London-based Puck Rakuten had read in translation. The cover format was deliberately bold: a single full-color lithographed gag image filling the sheet, an Anglo-American visual joke rendered in the brighter Japanese chromolithograph palette that had become available in the early 1900s. This 1905 cover, preserved in lower resolution on Wikimedia Commons, is the earliest of the surviving Tokyo Puck images that documents Rakuten's first conception of the magazine; it stands at the threshold of his most influential decade, before the political pressures of the 1910s drew him gradually toward the more conservative editorial line he would maintain after returning to Jiji Shinpō in 1915.