<i>Ise Furuichi Bizenya Okaro odori no zu</i> (Picture of the Ise Dance Performance in the Bizenya Restaurant in Ise Furuichi)

Ise Furuichi Bizenya Okaro odori no zu (Picture of the Ise Dance Performance in the Bizenya Restaurant in Ise Furuichi) is a Meiji [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) composition by Toyohara Chikanobu held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The print documents a specific entertainment associated with the Furuichi pleasure quarter near the Ise Grand Shrines, where the Bizenya was a celebrated establishment offering food, lodging, and the okage odori-derived dance performances that drew pilgrims and travellers. Chikanobu organizes the scene as a panoramic interior view, characteristic of the multi-sheet horizontal format he often used for genre and event pictures: dancers in matching kimono move across a polished wooden stage, while seated patrons, attendants, and shamisen players frame the action. As in many of his court ladies prints and elite-genre scenes, the artist pays close attention to textile pattern and the architecture of formal hospitality, with rows of paper lanterns, sliding screens, and tatami modules establishing the social space. The palette mixes traditional indigo and earth tones with the brighter reds and purples that signal Meiji-period production. Chikanobu trained in the Utagawa school under Kuniyoshi and later Kunisada, and by the 1880s he had become one of the most prolific designers working for Tokyo publishers; his Ise Furuichi sheet sits within a broader visual culture in which Meiji ukiyo-e helped advertise famous restaurants, theatres, and regional attractions to an increasingly mobile domestic audience. The Victoria and Albert Museum catalogue entry preserves the original Japanese title and identifies the subject as a record of a real performance venue, making this print useful both as an example of Chikanobu's mature design practice and as documentary evidence for late nineteenth-century leisure culture around the Ise shrines.