Sergeant First-Class Yokoi ...

The 1895 print of Sergeant First-Class Yokoi—another enlisted warrior commemorated in the individual portrait series—extended the war print tradition's democratic impulse to the non-commissioned ranks. The sergeant's status, above the common soldier but below the officer class, gave him a specific social position in the military hierarchy that Gekko might have conveyed through bearing: the confident authority of an experienced NCO who had learned leadership through practice rather than class privilege.