The Emperor Arriving in Tokyo

The Emperor Arriving in Tokyo (東京御着輦) is one of two large wall paintings contributed by Kobori Tomone to the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery (Seitoku Kinen Kaigakan) at the Meiji Jingū Gaien in Tokyo. The gallery, erected between 1919 and 1926 to house a permanent cycle of eighty paintings depicting the major events of the reign of the Emperor Meiji, awarded Tomone two of the most prestigious slots in the cycle. This painting, dedicated in 1934 (three years after the artist's death), depicts the Emperor Meiji's arrival in the newly renamed eastern capital — the moment in 1868 when, under the new imperial regime, the Edo of the shogunate was formally transformed into the Tokyo of the modern state. Tomone treats the scene as a state-ceremonial procession: the imperial palanquin, the mounted officers of the household guard, the courtiers in court dress, the carefully reconstructed ceremonial regalia, all rendered in the precise Tosa-yamato-e idiom Tomone had developed across his career in rekishi-ga. The painting is executed in mineral pigments on canvas, scaled to the wall format of the Memorial Picture Gallery (approximately three by two and a half metres), and was installed in the gallery's permanent display alongside the seventy-nine other large-format Meiji-period scenes that together constitute the canonical visual memory of the Restoration. The work remains in situ at the Meiji Memorial Picture Gallery and is one of the most-seen Tomone paintings in Japan.