Carrying a lantern sponsored by the Kojimachi, from the series "The Festival of the Sanno Shrine (Sanno gosairei)"

Carrying a Lantern Sponsored by the Kojimachi is a 1780 woodblock print by Torii Kiyonaga from the series The Festival of the Sanno Shrine (Sanno gosairei), in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The Sanno Festival was one of the two great shogunal festivals of Edo, in which decorated floats and lanterns were paraded through the city under the sponsorship of various neighborhood associations. This sheet shows participants carrying a large lantern sponsored by the Kojimachi district, situating the work precisely within the social geography of Edo public ritual. Kiyonaga organizes the procession with characteristic compositional clarity, balancing the bulk of the lantern against the figures who carry and accompany it. The series as a whole gave Kiyonaga, as head of the Torii school, an opportunity to apply the workshop's strengths to civic ceremony, a subject area that overlapped with but extended beyond conventional Edo [bijin-ga](/glossary/bijin-ga). The participants are rendered with the elongated, dignified bearing of his contemporary figural style, while the lantern and its decorations are described with attentiveness to neighborhood identity. The Art Institute of Chicago documents this impression among its Sanno gosairei holdings, where it forms part of a series that is valuable both as visual documentation of late-eighteenth-century Edo festival life and as evidence of Kiyonaga's range. The print shows how a Torii school designer could translate the workshop's experience with theatrical processions into a register appropriate to actual civic ritual, and its specific attribution to Kojimachi sponsorship gives the design an unusually concrete documentary character.