A Japanese Sailor Leaps on Board a Russian Warship and Kicks its Captain Overboard - From: Records of the Russo Japanese War Michiro Kosen Kibun

This sheet from Records of the Russo-Japanese War (Michiro kosen kibun) belongs to one of the print serials that publishers issued at speed during the conflict of 1904-1905. Migita Toshihide contributed regularly to such series, and the scene shown here, a Japanese sailor vaulting onto the deck of a Russian warship and kicking its captain into the sea, is exactly the kind of named heroic exploit that the series collected. As a Yoshitoshi student, Toshihide had been trained to compose extreme physical action across a single sheet, and the senso-e idiom of Meiji prints gave him an ongoing commercial outlet for that training. The image is held by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and is accessible through [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org. The composition relies on a strong diagonal: the leaping sailor crossing from sheet edge into the centre, the toppling officer pitched outward, and the steeply tilted deck supplying the line that pushes the eye across the page. Naval senso-e were generally harder to design than land subjects, because ships and water both resisted the conventional treatment of battlefield smoke and flag-bearing infantry, and Toshihide handles the problem here by anchoring the scene to its two named bodies rather than to the larger vessel. The print exemplifies the print-as-news-bulletin function of late Meiji woodblock publishing.