A Righteous War to Chastise the Russians: The Destroyer Force's Night Attack (Chō Ro gisen, kichiku tai yashū)

This 1904 triptych by Shinohara Kiyooki, held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (accession sc11144, object 129741), depicts the opening engagement of the Russo-Japanese War: the surprise night-time torpedo-boat attack on the Russian Pacific Fleet at the harbor of Port Arthur (Lüshun) on the night of 8-9 February 1904, which preceded the formal declaration of hostilities by two days and damaged three Russian capital ships. The Japanese title chō Ro gisen, kichiku tai yashū ("the righteous war to chastise Russia: the destroyer force's night attack") frames the conflict in the heightened nationalist rhetoric of 1904, with the term kichiku ("demonic brute") applied to the Russian adversary in the manner of the era's senso-e propaganda tradition. Kiyooki's composition uses the panoramic triptych format characteristic of late-Meiji war prints, with searchlights, torpedo wakes, and the silhouettes of capital ships rendered against the night sea in dramatic chiaroscuro. The print is one of his latest dated works and is a key Russo-Japanese War triptych within the larger senso-e corpus of the early twentieth century. The MFA's holding comes from the William Sturgis Bigelow collection of late-Meiji ukiyo-e, one of the principal American repositories of the genre.