Nichiro ryokantai nigatsu yoka no yo Ryojun-ko taikaisen ni meiyo naru waga no suiraitei tekkan niseki o gekichin-su

This Meiji woodblock [triptych](/glossary/triptych) by Migita Toshihide depicts a night naval action in the opening weeks of the Russo-Japanese War: the attack of the night of February 8, 1904, on the Russian Pacific Squadron outside Port Arthur (Ryojun-ko), when Japanese torpedo boats and destroyers struck the Russian fleet at anchor. The long descriptive title, characteristic of Meiji senso-e (war prints), names the engagement and credits Japanese torpedo craft with sinking two Russian ironclads, framing the print as a piece of patriotic reportage rather than a generalized battle scene. Toshihide, a pupil of Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, was one of several late [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) artists who turned the conventions of [musha-e](/glossary/musha-e), the warrior-print tradition, to the documentation of modern conflict. Here the older idiom is visible in the dynamic diagonal of the composition and the dramatic contrasts of dark sea and bright firelight, while the subject matter is fully contemporary: steel-hulled warships, searchlights, and torpedo boats rather than mounted samurai. Print designers in 1904 worked rapidly to keep pace with telegraphed news from the front, and the triptych format allowed Toshihide to spread the action across three sheets, with vessels, sailors, and the burning Russian line distributed for narrative legibility. The palette relies on deep aniline blues and reds typical of late Meiji production, and the dense Japanese caption block functions both as title and as caption, anchoring the image in a specific newsworthy event. The British Museum holds this triptych in its Japanese print collection (accessible via ukiyo-e.org), where it stands as a documentary example of how the woodblock medium served as illustrated press in the months before photography took over war reporting.