Sumō at the Kinryūzan Sensōji Temple (Kinryūzan Sensōji sumō no zu)

This early-Meiji ōban color woodblock triptych by Utagawa Kuniteru II, held by the Edo-Tokyo Museum (accession 0194200521), depicts a sumō tournament at the Kinryūzan Sensōji Temple — the great Buddhist complex at Asakusa whose mountain name is Kinryūzan, the 'Golden Dragon Mountain.' Sensōji had served from the seventeenth century as one of the principal venues for organized professional sumō in Edo, alongside the Tomioka Hachimangū at Fukagawa and, from 1833 onward, the Eko-in temple in Ryōgoku that became the formal home of the Tokyo sumō tournaments.

The triptych composition records the temple's spacious precincts, the dohyō (sumo ring) at the center of the open ground, the seated patrons and spectators in the elevated stands, and the wrestlers in their ring-entering procession across the central sheet. The print belongs to the broader genre of sumo-tournament prints that documented major events in the calendar of the Tokyo sumō world during the transitional decades when the modern professional structure was being consolidated.

Kuniteru II's contribution to the early-Meiji sumō-e corpus — alongside his portraits of named wrestlers such as Takamiyama Daigorō and the Aioi Matsugorō portrait of 1869 — places him as one of the principal documenters of the transitional sumō world of the early 1870s. The Edo-Tokyo Museum's holdings of Meiji-era sumo prints provide a comprehensive visual record of this period, and Kuniteru II's Sensōji triptych contributes a key composition that links the venerable Asakusa entertainment district with the broader Edo-period sumo tradition that persisted into the new imperial era.