French Equestrian Circus on the Grounds of Asakusa Kannon Temple (Asakusa kannon keidai ni oite kōgyō tsukawashi sōrō — Furansu kyokuba)

French Equestrian Circus on the Grounds of Asakusa Kannon Temple (Asakusa kannon keidai ni oite kōgyō tsukawashi sōrō — Furansu kyokuba) is a 1871 woodblock print by Utagawa Kuniteru held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession JP3315). The print documents one of the most widely advertised entertainments of early Meiji Tokyo: the visit of a French circus troupe — almost certainly the Cirque Napoléon under the impresario Louis Soullier, which had performed in Yokohama from 1864 — to the grounds of the Asakusa Kannon (Sensō-ji) temple, a centuries-old center of Edo popular entertainment that had hosted spectacles, sideshows, and performance booths for generations. Kuniteru's composition depicts mounted equestrian acrobatics in the manner that European circus troupes had developed through the early nineteenth century, with riders standing on horseback and performing tricks at the gallop, observed by a crowd of Meiji Tokyo spectators including both Japanese figures in mixed traditional and Western dress and Western residents of the city. The print extends Kuniteru's [Yokohama-e](/glossary/yokohama-e) practice — the depiction of foreigners and foreign customs — into the new Meiji capital itself, recording the moment when European popular culture became visible as a public entertainment in central Tokyo. It belongs to a substantial subgenre of "foreign curiosity" prints produced in Tokyo from 1868 onwards.