First Lieutenant Mitani

First Lieutenant Mitani is portrayed in this January 1895 nishiki-e among Kiyochika's series of individual military hero portraits from the First Sino-Japanese War. The portrait convention Kiyochika developed for these prints — subject depicted in uniform with appropriate martial accessories against a neutral or atmospheric background — became a template quickly adopted by other publishers issuing war-hero imagery to a public hungry for faces to attach to the names appearing in daily dispatches.