Lao Laizi (Ro Raishi), from the series "Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko)"

Lao Laizi (Ro Raishi), from Utagawa Kuniyoshi's 1843 series Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety in China (Morokoshi nijushiko), illustrates one of the most famous Confucian exemplars of filial devotion. According to the traditional Chinese account compiled in the Yuan-dynasty Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety, Lao Laizi was seventy years old when he donned the colorful clothing of a child and played in his parents' yard so they would not feel the weight of their advanced age. The story made Lao Laizi a touchstone for the principle that filial care must consider parents' emotional well-being as well as their material needs. Kuniyoshi, better known for warrior prints, also produced extensive series engaging Chinese moral and historical subjects, reflecting the broad cultural interest in continental learning in late Edo Japan. The Morokoshi nijushiko series compiles each paragon's story into a single nishiki-e composition, typically pairing a vivid figural scene with an explanatory text cartouche. Kuniyoshi's energetic figure work animates even a domestic vignette of Lao Laizi's eccentric devotion. As Edo ukiyo-e of the late Tenpo era, the print employs color woodblock printing with characteristic attention to costume pattern and ground detail. This impression is preserved in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, where it documents the circulation of Chinese moral exemplars within nineteenth-century Japanese popular print culture.