Standing Portrait of the Sumō Wrestler Takamiyama Daigorō

This early-Meiji ōban color woodblock print by Utagawa Kuniteru II, held by the Edo-Tokyo Museum (accession 0194200225), depicts a standing portrait of the sumō wrestler Takamiyama Daigorō. Takamiyama, who held the makuuchi (top-division) rank during the early Meiji period, was among the leading wrestlers of the transitional decade in which the Edo-period sumō world was being consolidated into the modern professional structure recognizable today. The sumō industry of the early Meiji period continued the Edo conventions of stable affiliation, ranking ceremonies (banzuke), and the patron-client relationships that bound wrestlers to regional sponsors and merchant houses.

Kuniteru II inherited from his teacher Kunisada I the latter's long engagement with sumō-e, and his portraits of named wrestlers from the late 1860s and early 1870s — including the Aioi Matsugorō portrait of 1869 (Hara Shobō) and this Takamiyama composition — document the persistence of the sumō-e tradition through the Meiji transformation. The Edo-Tokyo Museum's substantial holdings of nineteenth-century sumō prints place Kuniteru II's contributions within the broader documentary record of the transitional Meiji sumō world.

The standing-portrait format (tachi-sugata) was a conventional sumō-e variant that depicted the wrestler in full figure rather than in the more common dohyō-iri (ring-entering) procession or the dramatic combat pose. The format gave the designer an opportunity to record the wrestler's distinctive keshō-mawashi (ornamental apron), embroidered with the patron stable's crest and the wrestler's name, and to display the wrestler's physical presence — the bulk, the elaborate top-knot, and the formal pose — that distinguished the named professional wrestler from the anonymous figures of generic sumō prints.