Change to the Taisho Era (1912)

This woodblock print commemorates the transition from the Meiji to the Taisho era in 1912, an event triggered by the death of Emperor Meiji on July 30 of that year. The change of era name was far more than an administrative formality: it marked the end of a forty-five-year reign that had transformed Japan from a feudal society into an industrialized world power. Mizushima Nihofu's print records the emotional and ceremonial gravity of this moment. Taisho-era artists frequently looked back at the Meiji period with a mixture of reverence and nostalgia, and Nihofu's treatment of this subject likely reflects that retrospective sensibility. The print stands as a work of visual journalism rendered in the woodblock medium, documenting a historical turning point that many Japanese experienced as the close of an era of unprecedented national change.