Daigaran hōyō no zu (Image of a Great Temple Buddhist Ceremony)

This 1863 ōban triptych by Utagawa Kunitsuna I, held by Waseda University Library (accession number 012-0304, with companion sheets 012-0305 and 012-0306 completing the three-panel composition), depicts a Daigaran hōyō no zu — an Image of a Great Temple Buddhist Ceremony. The composition records the elaborate ritual performances and ceremonial assemblies that marked major Buddhist memorial services at the great Edo temples, where the full bureaucratic and ceremonial apparatus of the Tokugawa religious establishment was on display.

The 1863 publication date places the print in the late Bunkyū era, when the political crises that would culminate in the 1868 Meiji Restoration were already unfolding around the shogunal court at Edo. Religious ceremonial prints of this kind served multiple functions: they documented actual rituals for participants and absentee viewers; they advertised the temples' patronage and political standing; and they participated in the popular print market for ceremonial-event imagery (whose other principal genres included shogunal processions, daimyo parades, and major festival depictions).

Waseda University Library's substantial nineteenth-century print collection — assembled primarily from the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum and related Edo-period sources — holds the print as part of its broader documentation of late-Edo visual culture. The triptych format and the elaborate compositional program demonstrate the technical and visual ambitions that Utagawa school designers brought to mid-nineteenth-century ceremonial subjects, complementing the more familiar genres of yakusha-e and musha-e within Kunitsuna's broader output.