Picture of Our Armed Forces Occupying Ryûkô Island (Waga gun Ryûkôtô o senryô suru no zu)

This woodblock print records the Japanese occupation of Ryûkô Island, an episode from the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. Island seizures were a significant element of Japan's Shandong and Liaodong campaigns, and prints documenting these territorial gains served a prominent role in the popular press. Kiyochika's composition likely depicts Imperial forces landing or assembling on the island's shore, with the sea providing a receding background that allowed him to deploy the atmospheric gradations in sky and water for which his kōsen-ga style was recognized. The formal title construction — Waga gun (Our armed forces) followed by the specific action — is characteristic of the triptych war-print genre commissioned by publishers during the conflict. Throughout this series, Kiyochika employed a taller, more dramatically framed composition than his earlier Tokyo light pictures, accommodating the panoramic demands of military subject matter. The print reflects the intense public appetite in Japan for visual documentation of the war, which generated one of the largest bodies of woodblock journalism in the medium's history.