Long Live the Great Japanese Empire! A Great Victory for Our Troops in the Assault on Songhwan is a 1894 senso-e [triptych](/glossary/triptych) by Mizuno Toshikata held by the Art Institute of Chicago (accession reference at artic.edu/artworks/223519). The Battle of Seonghwan, fought on 29 July 1894, was the first major land engagement of the Sino-Japanese War: Japanese forces under Major General Oshima Yoshimasa attacked Chinese troops near the village of Seonghwan in central Korea and dislodged them with relatively light casualties. As one of the opening victories of the war, Songhwan attracted a flurry of immediate woodblock commemoration, and Toshikata was among the most prolific senso-e designers on the publishers' rosters. As a Yoshitoshi student, he had been trained to compose action across a horizontal field while still giving named individual figures their own distinct presence, and this triptych demonstrates the approach in a wartime context. The slogan in the print's title, 'Long Live the Great Japanese Empire' (Dai Nihon teikoku banbanzai), is characteristic of the unabashed celebratory rhetoric that defined senso-e captions throughout 1894–1895. The Art Institute's 1894 dating places the print at the start of the wartime boom that would absorb much of Toshikata's output for the next year. As a primary document of the conflict, the print combines visual journalism with state-aligned propaganda, and its inclusion in a major museum collection reflects the renewed scholarly attention to senso-e as both art and historical record.
Long Live the Great Japanese Empire! A Great Victory for Our Troops in the Assault on Songhwan (Dai Nihon teikoku banbanzai, Seikan shugeki waga gun taisho no zu) was created by Mizuno Toshikata (水野年方) in 1894.
