The Grand Festival at Yasukuni Shrine (Yasukuni jinja daisai no zu)

This 1895 triptych by Shinohara Kiyooki, held by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (accession sc11159, object 161343), depicts the grand commemorative festival held at Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine following the conclusion of the First Sino-Japanese War. The Japanese title Yasukuni jinja daisai no zu ("illustration of the grand festival at Yasukuni Shrine") locates the print within the late-Meiji genre of senso-e that turned from battle imagery to memorial ceremony, treating the consecration of the war dead as the war's culminating public event. Yasukuni Shrine, established in 1869 to honor the dead of the Meiji Restoration's civil wars, had by 1895 become the central state-Shintō institution for memorializing the casualties of Japan's modernization wars, and the grand festival depicted here served to incorporate the Sino-Japanese War dead into the shrine's permanent roster of national martyrs. Kiyooki's panoramic triptych composition shows the crowded shrine precinct with imperial standards, processions of officials and veterans, and the architectural elements of the shrine itself rendered in the bright aniline reds of the Meiji color register. The print is a key example of the war's commemorative iconography and an important record of the early development of state-Shintō memorial culture during the modern imperial era.