Yasukuni Shrine — Statue of Ōmura Masujirō (Yasukuni Jinja, Ōmura Masujirō no Shōzō)

This 1893 oban triptych, signed in the artist name Yōsai Nobukazu, depicts visitors strolling around the bronze statue of the Meiji military strategist Ōmura Masujirō at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. Ōmura, a samurai of Chōshū and one of the principal architects of the new conscript army, was assassinated in Kyoto in 1869; in 1893 the bronze statue at Yasukuni, by the sculptor Ōkuma Ujihiro, was unveiled as the first Western-style public bronze of a modern Japanese subject and as a foundational martyr-monument for the Imperial Japanese Army. Watanabe Nobukazu's triptych, published by Hasegawa Tsunejirō, stages the new monument as a site of civic pilgrimage, with Tokyo residents in a mix of Western and Japanese dress gathered at its base and the architecture of the shrine precinct rendered in atmospheric detail. The print sits at the intersection of news reportage, religious imagery, and political iconography that characterized Meiji visual culture at its most state-aligned, and it documents the early visual formation of Yasukuni's identity as a shrine to the military dead. As a primary source for Meiji urban visual culture in the years between the constitutional founding of 1889 and the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, it is among Nobukazu's most informative prints.