Hell is Booming

"Hell is Booming" is a November 1894 satirical print from Kiyochika's Nippon Banzai! series, likely depicting the afterlife receiving an influx of Qing soldiers killed in the war's autumn battles. The comic premise — that Japan's military successes are so overwhelming that even the afterworld is struggling to accommodate the dead — was a running theme in Meiji satirical print culture, which treated the war's human cost as comedy rather than tragedy. The dark humour reflects the triumphal public mood of late 1894.