The First Battle on the Mainland : Great Victory of the Japanese Infantry (Rikujo daiissen Nihon rikugun 0daishori)

The First Battle on the Mainland: Great Victory of the Japanese Infantry refers to the earliest sustained land engagement of the First Sino-Japanese War, when Japanese forces under General Oshima Yoshimasa defeated Qing troops at Songhwan and Asan in late July 1894. Migita Toshihide responded to this campaign with multiple senso-e, and the present sheet, held in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and reproduced on [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org, belongs to that run. As a Yoshitoshi student, Toshihide had been trained to handle the choreographic problem of multiple advancing figures against an enemy line, and the design here typically arranges Japanese infantry pressing forward across a broken landscape with bayonets fixed and unit flags visible. Meiji prints of this campaign carried a particular weight because they marked the first decisive validation of the modernised Japanese army in field operations against a major foreign opponent, and titles invoking dai shori (great victory) appeared across the production of nearly every senso-e designer working in Tokyo in summer and autumn 1894. Toshihide's draughtsmanship here is consistent with the rest of his 1894-1895 output, careful uniform detail, controlled palette, clear figural hierarchy, and the print belongs to the strongest segment of his war reportage. It complements his Pyongyang and Yalu River subjects within an extended Sino-Japanese War serial run.