Takeda Harunobu Nyūdō Shingen and Itagaki Suruga-no-kami, from the series A Complete Picture of the Great Battle of Kawanakajima between Two Generals of Kō and Etsu

This color woodblock print by Utagawa Kunitsuna I, held by Waseda University Library (accession number 012-1418), depicts Takeda Harunobu Nyūdō Shingen — the great daimyo of Kai (modern Yamanashi) Province whose conflicts with Uesugi Kenshin at Kawanakajima produced some of the most celebrated military encounters of the Sengoku period — alongside his senior retainer Itagaki Suruga-no-kami (Itagaki Nobukata), from the series A Complete Picture of the Great Battle of Kawanakajima between Two Generals of Kō and Etsu. The print is the companion to the Uesugi Kenshin sheet (012-1417), and together they document the two principal opposing commanders of the Kawanakajima campaigns.

Takeda Shingen — like his rival Kenshin — became a paradigmatic Sengoku-era warrior in Tokugawa-period popular culture, his red-banner cavalry and his maxim 'fū-rin-ka-zan' (swift as the wind, silent as the forest, fierce as fire, immovable as a mountain) becoming enduring tropes of samurai narrative. Itagaki Nobukata, Shingen's senior retainer who died defending his lord at the first battle of Kawanakajima in 1548, completes the historical pairing.

Kunitsuna's series treats each general and senior retainer as the subject of an individual sheet, allowing collectors to assemble the complete cast of the Kawanakajima campaigns as a set of paired or grouped impressions. The Waseda Library's holdings of multiple sheets from the series document the print's commercial format and its place within the Bakumatsu-era musha-e program in which the Utagawa school designers turned to celebrated historical warrior subjects as both popular entertainment and as visual response to the political crises of the late Edo period.