Vice Admiral Ito Mocks, Points and Looks at the Enemy Bullets

Vice Admiral Ito Mocks, Points and Looks at the Enemy Bullets is a 1884-dated print by Mizuno Toshikata held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession reference at metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/55190). The subject is Vice Admiral Ito Sukeyuki (1843–1914), the Japanese naval commander who led the Combined Fleet during the Sino-Japanese War and famously accepted the surrender of the Beiyang Fleet at Weihaiwei in 1895; the title's bravura phrasing, with Ito disdaining enemy fire, is characteristic of the heroic register of senso-e captions in 1894–1895. The Met's catalog records the date as 1884, but this likely reflects a cataloging convention or a record entry rather than the printing date, since Ito's fame as a target of woodblock celebration is firmly tied to the wartime period a decade later; collectors should verify the precise publication date when consulting the museum directly. Whatever the resolution, the work is an instance of how Mizuno Toshikata, a Yoshitoshi student trained in biographical history painting, brought that approach to bear on living military officers. As one of the most active Meiji prints designers during the senso-e boom, Toshikata produced multiple Ito and Kabayama prints under commission to Tokyo publishers, and the Met's holdings preserve a substantial slice of that output. The compositional rhetoric — a single named hero defying enemy bullets — became a familiar visual idiom across the period and helped establish the genre's distinctive tone of confident reportage.