The Tiger of Ryōgoku, from the series True Scenes by Hirokage

The Tiger of Ryōgoku (Ryōgoku no tora) is a vertical ōban color woodblock print designed by Utagawa Hirokage and dated to the eighth month of 1860, from the small series Hirokage shinkei no uchi (廣景眞景之内, 'True Scenes by Hirokage'). It records a topical Edo event: a live tiger exhibited as a misemono (sideshow attraction) at the Ryōgoku district on the east bank of the Sumida River, the same entertainment quarter celebrated for its fireworks and ferry crossings. Ryōgoku had been a center of Edo popular entertainment since the 1650s, and live-animal misemono — featuring imported birds, monkeys, elephants, and the occasional big cat — were a recurring novelty for the urban crowd. Hirokage's print stages the encounter as comic spectacle: the tiger crouches in a striped frenzy at left while spectators recoil and gawk, with poetic tanka by Kanagaki Robun (1829-1894), the prolific Edo-Meiji popular writer, inscribed at upper right. The print sits squarely in the late-Edo tradition of topical reportage prints (jiji-e), but Hirokage's eye for comic gesture aligns it more closely with Utagawa Kuniyoshi's humor than with the dignified [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) of his teacher Hiroshige. The Metropolitan Museum's impression (accession 2007.49.263), part of the Henry L. Phillips Collection bequeathed in 1939 and later transferred, is one of the better-preserved copies of this design and offers a rare look at Hirokage outside the Edo meisho dōke zukushi for which he is otherwise best known.