[A whale and three fish sitting down to a formal dinner of Russian sailors]

Among the more darkly comic of Kiyochika's Russo-Japanese War satires, this print translates naval battle into a grotesque dinner scene: marine animals dining on Russian sailors inverts the human relationship to the sea and to warfare. The formal dinner setting — presumably rendered with the same props as the officer meal scenes elsewhere in the series — applied to whale and fish diners produces the absurdist quality characteristic of Meiji war caricature at its most inventive. The print alludes to Russian naval defeats, particularly the destruction of the Russian fleet, by imagining the drowned sailors as consumed by the sea itself. Kiyochika's bold flat color and clear silhouette rendering serve the satirical premise's visual immediacy.