Horse Racing at the Shōkonsha in Tokyo

This print of the horse race at the Shōkonsha in Tokyo, dated 1870 (Meiji 3) and held at the Equine Museum of Japan, depicts the first formal horse race organized by Japanese (rather than the foreign community at Yokohama, which had been racing horses since the late 1860s) at the grounds of the Shōkonsha in Kudan. The Shōkonsha had been established by imperial edict in 1869 to commemorate the war dead of the Boshin War of the Restoration; it would be renamed Yasukuni Shrine in 1879. The horse race, organized as part of the early Meiji program of incorporating Western public entertainments and military exercises into Japanese ceremonial life, was an event of considerable historical significance in the broader story of Japanese modernization, and Ikkei's print is one of the principal contemporary depictions of it. The composition uses the full ōban-yokoe horizontal format to lay out the racetrack and grandstand, with mounted riders in mixed Western and Japanese costume galloping across the foreground and a dense crowd of Japanese and foreign spectators arranged around the rail. The saturated reds and pinks of the early Meiji aniline palette give the image its characteristic high-pitched color register, and the artist's signature 'Shōsai Ikkei ga' is clearly visible in the lower-right cartouche.