True Picture of a Five-Story Building at Kaiun Bridge (Mitsui House), First National Bank of Japan

This 1872 ōban color woodblock triptych by Utagawa Kuniteru II, held by the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (accession aggv-17004), depicts the five-story Mitsui House at Kaiun Bridge that briefly housed the First National Bank of Japan (Daiichi Kokuritsu Ginkō) from its founding in 1873. The building, designed by the American architect Thomas Waters in the European Renaissance Revival style and built by the Japanese master carpenter Shimizu Kisuke II's firm, was the largest Western-style structure in early-Meiji Tokyo and a defining visual emblem of the modernization program.

The AGGV impression complements the Edo-Tokyo Museum's parallel composition (accession 0188208038) of the same building, recorded in the broader cycle of Kuniteru II's Meiji kaika-e. The two impressions together document the wide commercial circulation of the print across the early-Meiji Tokyo market and the survival of multiple impressions in museum collections — one in Japan and one in Canada — that have preserved the visual record of the building's brief but iconic existence.

The AGGV's caption describes the composition as 'a panorama view in three sections of a large building with a street scene in the foreground depicting people, horse-drawn carriage, rickshaw, lantern posts.' The visual repertoire — the elaborate brick façade, the horse-drawn carriages, the rickshaws, the gas lamps, and the figures in mixed Western-Japanese dress — is the standard kaika-e vocabulary of the early-Meiji period. The Mitsui House (later the First National Bank) stood as a singular visual icon of the new commercial and financial infrastructure that the Meiji government was building in central Tokyo, and Kuniteru II's triptych is among the principal contemporary print records of that structure.