Dai shori 大勝利 (A Great Victory)

Dai shori (A Great Victory) is a title used repeatedly across Meiji senso-e to mark decisive engagements, and Migita Toshihide deployed the phrase in his Sino-Japanese War output of the mid-1890s. This impression is held by the British Museum and is accessible through [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org. The senso-e idiom in which Toshihide worked depended on a compositional grammar that he had learned in part from his teacher Yoshitoshi: a clear hierarchy of figures, a flag or commander to anchor the visual centre, and a smoke-streaked or dust-blown ground to suggest the chaos beyond the print's frame. As a Yoshitoshi student, Toshihide carried that grammar forward through both the 1894-1895 conflict and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. Sheets titled Dai shori typically functioned as triumphal markers within longer print serials, and publishers timed them to coincide with major newspaper reports of Japanese victories. Toshihide's handling here is consistent with his other Meiji prints in this category: precise drawing of uniforms and equipment, restrained colour relative to some contemporaries, and a foreground populated by named or namable individual soldiers rather than by an undifferentiated mass. The print belongs to the larger corpus of senso-e through which Toshihide built his late nineteenth-century reputation.