A Collection of 'Children's Sports'

This 1888 woodblock-printed book, held by the Victoria and Albert Museum under accession number O489662, is Kobayashi Eitaku's 'A Collection of Children's Sports,' a Meiji-era record of the games, pastimes, and play activities of Japanese childhood. Executed in the careful observational line that distinguishes Eitaku's design and illustration work, the volume documents the world of children's play at the cusp of Japan's industrial transformation, preserving images of traditional pastimes, including ball games, kite flying, top spinning, hopscotch variants, and seasonal play, alongside the dress and settings of late-Edo and early-Meiji childhood. The book belongs to a broader genre of Meiji ehon (illustrated books) that documented vanishing or fast-changing aspects of everyday life as Japan modernized; works of this kind served both an ethnographic function for contemporary readers and an archival one for later historians of childhood and material culture. Kobayashi Eitaku, trained in the Kano school under Kano Eishin and active across genre, historical narrative, and design subjects, brought to the volume the same eclectic sensibility that animates his more famous design compendia. As a Meiji ukiyo-e document, the print is a useful primary source for the visual history of Japanese childhood and a characteristic example of how an eclectic painter of Eitaku's training adapted the woodblock medium to documentary and illustrational ends. It is preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection of Japanese illustrated books.