"Triptych: Great Victory for the Japanese Army at P'yông Yang (Nichigun Heijô taisho no zu), Meiji period, dated 1894"

A complete oban triptych documenting the Japanese army's decisive victory at the Battle of Pyongyang on September 15, 1894, in which General Yamagata Aritomo's First Army drove Qing forces from the Korean city in the opening major land engagement of the First Sino-Japanese War. Across three joined panels, Gekko deploys a panoramic compositional strategy that his individual battle sheets cannot accommodate: a continuous terrain stretching from one flank's action to another, with massed troop movements, fortification walls, artillery positions, and the city itself legible as an integrated spatial whole. The triptych format, inherited from the Edo-period tradition of sumo and kabuki triptychs, here carries a nationalistic function, its physical scale amplifying the grandeur of the victory it records. Smoke gradations in bokashi unify the three panels atmospherically, while the foreground figures in Meiji military uniform anchor the scene in contemporary specificity.