The Battle of Ishiyama Hongan-ji (Ishiyama Hongan-ji kassen)

This 1869 color woodblock print (nishiki-e), held by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston (accession reference sc161635), is Utagawa Yoshitomi's depiction of the Battle of Ishiyama Hongan-ji (Ishiyama Hongan-ji kassen) — the protracted ten-year conflict of 1570-1580 in which the warlord Oda Nobunaga besieged the militarized Pure Land Buddhist fortress-temple at Ishiyama (on the site of present-day Osaka Castle), one of the central engagements of Japan's sixteenth-century unification wars. The print belongs to Yoshitomi's early Meiji output and demonstrates a return to the warrior subjects (musha-e) that had been the central preoccupation of his teacher Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861). The political upheavals of 1867-1868 that produced the Meiji Restoration prompted a substantial renewal of Japanese historical battle prints, as the new Meiji state's reframing of national history created fresh demand for printed images of the unification wars, the Genpei conflicts, and the heroic military past. Yoshitomi's Ishiyama Hongan-ji print belongs to this early Meiji historical mode and reconnects his Bakumatsu Yokohama-e output with the Kuniyoshi-tradition musha-e from which his training had begun. The print is held in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston's collection of nineteenth-century Japanese prints and is a representative example of his post-Restoration historical work.