Righteousness (Gi), from the series "Five Designs for the Katsushika Poetry Circle (Katsushika goban)"

Righteousness (Gi) is one sheet from Kubo Shunman's series Five Designs for the Katsushika Poetry Circle (Katsushika goban), a set of [surimono](/glossary/surimono) produced for a kyoka club operating in the Katsushika area east of Edo. The series takes the five Confucian cardinal virtues, of which righteousness, gi, is one, and turns each into a visual prompt for poems by the circle's members. Such conceptual frameworks were typical of kyoka-e: an abstract theme, drawn from classical philosophy, theater, or literature, organized a sequence of small, witty pictures by a single designer. Shunman, a leading Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) artist for this kind of project, approaches gi with characteristic restraint, choosing a quiet pictorial vehicle rather than an obvious moralizing emblem and leaving the inscribed kyoka to do the conceptual work alongside the image. Issued around 1810 and held today by the Art Institute of Chicago, the print exemplifies the way surimono fused literary, philosophical, and visual references in a compact, privately circulated object. The picture's printing, with the refined registration and muted palette typical of high-quality surimono of the period, complements Shunman's careful drawing. For modern viewers, the work offers a useful window into how the Katsushika group and similar Edo kyoka circles used the Confucian virtues as a familiar grid against which their poems and Kubo Shunman's pictures could play, alternately serious, playful, and intentionally oblique.