Kenkoku Sōgyō (Founding the Nation)

Kenkoku Sōgyō (Founding the Nation, 1907) was Nakamura Fusetsu's most ambitious early historical canvas and his principal submission to the Tokyo Industrial Exhibition (Tōkyō Kangyō Hakurankai) held in Ueno Imperial Grant Park from 20 March to 31 July 1907. The painting drew its subject from the foundation myth of the Japanese imperial line — the descent of the sun-goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami's grandson Ninigi-no-Mikoto to the mountain of Takachiho-no-mine in Kyushu and the establishment of the imperial dynasty through his great-grandson, the first Emperor Jimmu — and treated it in the multi-figure grand-machine manner Fusetsu had absorbed under Jean-Paul Laurens in Paris, with the gathered deities arranged in a hieratic procession across a steep mountain landscape. The original canvas was tragically destroyed in the fires that followed the 1 September 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, which obliterated a substantial portion of the Tokyo collections of Meiji oil painting, and survives only through the photographic reproduction in Fusetsu Gashū (Fusetsu Collection), published by the Pacific Painting Academy in 1939 and now held in the National Diet Library Digital Collection. As one of the most ambitious Meiji-period treatments of the imperial foundation myth in oil paint, Kenkoku Sōgyō remains a foundational lost work of late-Meiji yōga.