Tokyo Puck Cover, February 1909

This cover for Tokyo Puck (Tōkyō Pakku) issue four of volume five, dated February 1909, is one of the best-documented surviving copies of the satirical color weekly Kitazawa Rakuten founded in April 1905, and the issue is preserved in the Rijksmuseum's print collection (RP-P-2005-572). Tokyo Puck was modeled on the long-running American humor magazine Puck and on the English Puck Rakuten had encountered while working alongside the Australian-American cartoonist Frank Arthur Nankivell at the foreigner-run Box of Curios in Yokohama in the late 1890s; Rakuten served as editor and principal cartoonist from its founding through 1915. The magazine was a full-color lithographed weekly carrying cartoons and captions in Japanese, Chinese and English, an ambitious trilingual format that allowed it to circulate across Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and the treaty-port communities of mainland China. This particular cover, depicting two men and two chickens in Rakuten's loose-line satirical idiom, is typical of Tokyo Puck's covers: a single full-bleed gag image in flat, vibrant color, drawn in the imported Anglo-American political-cartoon manner but rendered with the line economy of Japanese woodblock illustration. The Rijksmuseum copy survives at high resolution—nearly six thousand pixels on its long edge—because the museum's print department acquired and catalogued the magazine as a historical lithograph rather than as ephemera, and the file has since been released under a Creative Commons CC0 dedication. The 1909 date situates the cover at the height of Tokyo Puck's influence, two years before the High Treason Incident that would push Rakuten's politics in a more conservative direction.