Arrival of the Emperor at Tokyo after the Victory (Russo-Japanese War)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art catalogues this print (accession 55269) as "Arrival of the Emperor at Tokyo after the Victory (Russo-Japanese War)," dated 1895, and attributes the design to Utagawa Kunisada. The combination is internally inconsistent and merits caution: Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III) died in 1865, three decades before the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, and the 1895 year would still postdate his life by thirty years. The most likely readings are that the design is by a later artist working under an Utagawa name (perhaps Kunisada III or another late Utagawa-school designer), that the museum record is in transition, or that the subject is a Sino-Japanese War scene mislabeled. With those caveats noted, the sheet belongs to the senso-e (war print) genre that flourished in the 1890s, in which Meiji designers extended Edo ukiyo-e print conventions to coverage of imperial military events. Read alongside Kunisada's nineteenth-century yakusha-e and bijin-ga, the print illustrates how the Utagawa name and its visual vocabulary persisted into late Meiji journalism, even as the original Edo context that gave ukiyo-e its name had vanished.