Hojo Takattoki Dancing with Phantom Goblins (Tengumai ) from the series Eighteen Examples of Valor (Meijo juhachiban)

Hojo Takattoki Dancing with Phantom Goblins (Tengumai), from the series Eighteen Examples of Valor (Meijo juhachiban), draws on one of the most striking late-medieval episodes in Japanese political history: Hojo Takatoki, the dissolute final regent of the Kamakura shogunate, was said to have danced with tengu while neglecting the affairs of state, and the scene gave printmakers a memorable vehicle for combining supernatural imagery with moralising historical commentary. Migita Toshihide treated Hojo Takatoki repeatedly across his career, and the present impression, held in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and reproduced on [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org, sits within his Meiji historical series. As a Yoshitoshi student, Toshihide had absorbed his teacher's interest in subjects that mixed historical record with the supernatural, and this design carries that inheritance directly. The composition typically arranges several tengu around the dancing regent, the feathered and beaked masks providing rapid figural variation and the courtly costume of Hojo anchoring the centre. The series title Meijo juhachiban frames the subject within a programme of valor-related historical exempla, which is in tension with Hojo Takatoki's traditional reputation as a negative example. Toshihide's handling exploits that tension and produces one of his most pictorially energetic non-war designs.