Kato Kiyomasa lifting a tree trunk (first in triptych)

Kato Kiyomasa Lifting a Tree Trunk presents one of the legendary feats of strength attributed to the late Sengoku-period general Kato Kiyomasa, whose career under Toyotomi Hideyoshi and whose campaigns in Korea in the 1590s made him an enduring subject for Edo and Meiji printmakers. This impression, the first sheet of a [triptych](/glossary/triptych) held in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and reproduced on [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org, belongs to Migita Toshihide's historical-warrior production rather than to his contemporary battle prints. As a Yoshitoshi student, Toshihide had been trained on the iconography of warrior-heroes that his teacher had himself developed in series like Yoshitoshi musha burui, and the Kato Kiyomasa subject sits squarely within that lineage. The triptych format gives the design room to extend the action across three sheets: typically Kato at one edge with the tree trunk hoisted, his subordinates and onlookers arranged across the central and right-hand sheets, and a landscape setting drawn from his Korean campaign. Meiji prints of Kato Kiyomasa enjoyed renewed popularity during the 1894-1895 Sino-Japanese War, because his sixteenth-century continental campaigns could be invoked as a precedent for the contemporary engagement. Toshihide's handling here is consistent with the rest of his late nineteenth-century historical work, careful figural drawing, restrained colour and a coherent sense of narrative space across the triptych.