Ichikawa Sandanji lll is in the role of the 47 Ronin Leader, Oboshi Yuranosuke

Ota Masamitsu's portrait of Ichikawa Sandanji III as Oboshi Yuranosuke, the leader of the forty-seven ronin, captures one of the most storied figures in the Japanese theatrical canon. Yuranosuke is the central character of Kanadehon Chushingura, the great revenge drama in which a band of masterless samurai avenge the death of their lord. Ota Masamitsu, a printmaker who specialized in shin-hanga yakusha-e (new-style actor prints), worked in the Showa-era tradition of documenting the great kabuki performers of his day, and his depictions of Sandanji III place him firmly within that lineage of stage portraiture descended from Sharaku and Toyokuni. In this Japanese woodblock print, the actor is rendered in the contemplative, weighted stance that defined his interpretation of the role: a man carrying the burden of a long vendetta and the lives of his comrades. The composition concentrates attention on the face and the set of the shoulders, the hallmarks of a yakusha-e tradition that treated each performer's likeness as a record worth preserving in pigment and woodblock. Ichikawa Sandanji III (1880-1940) was one of the most progressive kabuki actors of the early twentieth century, instrumental in the shin-kabuki reform movement and in introducing Western stagecraft to traditional Japanese theatre. The choice to depict him as Yuranosuke connects modern stage history to the eighteenth-century Genroku-era source material that gave Chushingura its enduring power. The image survives in the holdings cataloged through ukiyo-e.org, which preserves Ota Masamitsu's Showa portraits among the wider corpus of twentieth-century Japanese print art.