Sasaki Moritsuna Asking Fisherman to Reveal the Shallows Where His Troops can Cross and Attack the Taira Forces at Fujito in Bizen Province (Sasaki Moritsuna Bizen no kuni Fujito no watari ni Heigun o osowanto gyojin ni mizu no senshin o tou zu)

Sasaki Moritsuna Asking Fisherman to Reveal the Shallows Where His Troops can Cross and Attack the Taira Forces at Fujito in Bizen Province is a 1884 historical print by Mizuno Toshikata held by the Art Institute of Chicago (accession reference at artic.edu/artworks/223508). The print depicts an incident from the Genpei War of the 1180s: Sasaki Moritsuna, a Minamoto retainer, reportedly bribed and then killed a local fisherman who showed him a fordable shallows that allowed his cavalry to cross to attack the Taira forces at Fujito. The episode was canonized in the Heike Monogatari and dramatized in the Noh play Fujito, in which the slain fisherman's mother confronts Moritsuna; the subject thus carries strong moral ambiguity even before a print designer engages it. Toshikata, a Yoshitoshi student already producing significant historical work by 1884, used such episodes to display his command of the warrior-print (musha-e) tradition that Yoshitoshi had revived and rebuilt. The Art Institute's 1884 dating places the print within the artist's vigorous early period, the same year as his Sakamoto Otasuku in the Metropolitan Museum's collection. While Toshikata is often grouped with senso-e designers because of his later Sino-Japanese War prints, his historical battle pictures of the 1880s are arguably the clearest demonstration of how directly he inherited Yoshitoshi's narrative ambitions. The print's classical subject and Meiji-period production place it at an interesting intersection in late nineteenth-century Japanese visual culture, where audiences were being re-introduced to medieval material as part of a wider construction of national history.