Russo-Japanese War (Ohashi Keikichi Kills an Enemy Soldier)

Russo-Japanese War (Ohashi Keikichi Kills an Enemy Soldier) belongs to the run of senso-e that Migita Toshihide produced during the 1904-1905 conflict, in which named individual Japanese soldiers were attached to specific battlefield exploits. Ohashi Keikichi appears here in the act of dispatching a Russian opponent, and the print, held in the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and reproduced on [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org, follows the named-soldier formula that Toshihide had developed during the earlier Sino-Japanese War. As a Yoshitoshi student, he had been trained to isolate a single protagonist in violent action within a larger composition, and the design works exactly along those lines: foreground close-quarters combat between two named or symbolic figures, with the broader battle implied by a smoke-streaked or troop-filled background. Meiji prints of the Russo-Japanese War extended the senso-e tradition by another decade and demonstrated the continued utility of the woodblock medium as a vehicle for patriotic biography even as photography began to dominate the press. Toshihide's draughtsmanship in 1904-1905 prints retains the precision of his 1894-1895 work, with careful attention to uniform detail, weapons and posture. The print belongs to the late phase of his career, alongside the Mukden and Teishu sheets and other Russo-Japanese subjects.