No. 4: Chinese boys playing a raffle game, from the series "Children Say 'This is Japan!' and Imitate the Games They See in Picturebooks (Yodo iu koitsu wa Nippon, ezoshi o mite yori sono gai ni asobu)"

Designed in 1786, this print by Torii Kiyonaga belongs to the series "Children Say 'This is Japan!' and Imitate the Games They See in Picturebooks (Yodo iu koitsu wa Nippon, ezoshi o mite yori sono gai ni asobu)," a sequence built around the conceit that Japanese children, having pored over imported picture books, now act out the foreign scenes they have seen. In sheet number four, a group of boys play a Chinese raffle game, their clothing and accessories carefully arranged to evoke a continental setting while their faces and proportions remain unmistakably those of Edo street children. As the head of the Torii school, Kiyonaga is best known for his Edo bijin-ga of stately, willowy women, but he was also a sensitive observer of children at play, and the series demonstrates how he could miniaturize his characteristic compositional poise without sacrificing the lucid drawing and balanced groupings that defined late eighteenth-century ukiyo-e. The figures are arranged across the sheet in an even, frieze-like rhythm, with the raffle apparatus at the visual hinge of the group, encouraging the eye to read each child's gesture before returning to the central game. The print is preserved in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, which catalogues it as part of the Kodakara gosetsu asobi-adjacent body of children-themed designs that Kiyonaga produced in the 1780s and 1790s. Together with the rest of the series, it shows the Torii school engaging playfully with Japan's cultural absorption of foreign motifs through the imagination of its youngest viewers.