Shasei yonju-hachi taka gajo (Lifelike Drawings of 48 Kinds of Hawk)

Shasei yonjū-hachi taka gajō (Lifelike Drawings of 48 Kinds of Hawk) is the British Museum's bound album of Nakayama Sūgakudō's complete 1859 bird-and-flower series, reissued in album form with a preface and colophon printed in Japanese, French, and English — an explicitly export-oriented edition produced for the Western market in the decades following the opening of Japan to international trade. The shift in title, from the original 1859 Ikiutsushi yonjūhachiyō (Forty-eight Birds Drawn from Life) to the album's Shasei yonjū-hachi taka gajō (Lifelike Drawings of 48 Kinds of Hawk), reflects a Western cataloguing emphasis on the raptor plates and on the natural-history language of "lifelike drawing" rather than the more poetic Japanese sense of ikiutsushi as "copying from life." The British Museum's album is one of several institutional copies of this export edition that allowed Sūgakudō's bird-and-flower designs to circulate internationally as a kind of illustrated ornithology, and it remains the most accessible single document of the series, presenting all forty-eight plates together in their original Kōeidō publication sequence with the publisher's seals intact.