Silver Wedding Anniversary State Ceremony (Ginkon taiten no gi shiki)

This 1894 woodblock triptych depicts the state ceremony marking the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of the Meiji Emperor and Empress, held on 9 March 1894. The 'silver wedding' was a consciously European convention transposed into Japanese imperial ritual; its celebration was intended to project the imperial family as a modern dynastic household on the model of European royal houses, and the public ceremony was choreographed accordingly, with foreign diplomats, military officers, and court officials assembled in the Imperial Palace to witness the Emperor and Empress in matching ceremonial dress. Watanabe Nobukazu's triptych, signed in the artist name Yōsai Nobukazu, stages the scene with the Emperor and Empress at the center of a hall filled with officials in European-style court uniforms, the architecture of the new palace rendered with documentary specificity, and the composition asserting the union of native sovereignty with modern dynastic form. A version of the print is held in the Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Like Nobukazu's military prints, the work belongs to the dense Meiji genre of state-aligned visual reporting and helps construct the iconography by which the constitutional monarchy was made visible to the broader Japanese public.