Ueno Park: 2nd National Industrial Exhibition

This 1881 color woodblock print, held by the Edo-Tokyo Museum, depicts the Second National Industrial Exhibition (Dai nikai naikoku kangyō hakurankai) that opened in Ueno Park, Tokyo, on March 1, 1881, and ran for 122 days through June 30, drawing 823,094 visitors including the Meiji Emperor and Empress Shōken. The exhibition was the second in a series of five state-sponsored industrial fairs staged between 1877 and 1903 as part of the Meiji government's program of promoting domestic industry (shokusan kōgyō), and it occupied a 143,000-square-meter venue in Ueno Park with eight exhibition structures, including the newly constructed museum building designed by the British architect Josiah Conder. Morikawa Chikashige's print belongs to the dense wave of contemporary visual reporting on the exhibition that included designs by Utagawa Hiroshige III, Yōshū Chikanobu, and other Meiji print designers, and it served the same function as newspaper illustration in giving a wide popular audience a vivid picture of an event that crystallized the state's narrative of industrial modernization. The composition places identifiable architectural elements of the Ueno fairgrounds in the middle distance and stages elegantly dressed visitors, both Japanese and Western, across the foreground, in keeping with the Meiji kaika-e (enlightenment print) genre of which it is a representative example. The print is a useful primary source for the visual history of Meiji-era expositions and is part of the Edo-Tokyo Museum's collection of Meiji woodblock prints.