Empire Day of Japan (Kigensetsu)

This 1878 color woodblock triptych, held by the British Museum and accessible through Wikimedia Commons, was published as a supplement to the Chōya shimbun newspaper to commemorate the first major public celebration of Kigensetsu, the Empire Day that the new Meiji government had established to mark the mythological founding of Japan by the first emperor Jinmu Tennō on the eleventh day of the second month in 660 BCE. The holiday, instituted in 1872 and observed publicly from 1873 onward, was one of the most ambitious of the regime's invented traditions, intended to anchor the modern Meiji imperial state in a deep mythic past predating Buddhism, the Chinese influence, and even the historical foundation of Japanese civilization. Toshinobu's composition shows the elaborate festival processions, ceremonial banners, and crowds that gathered in central Tokyo for the holiday, with the imperial palace as the geographic and symbolic focus. The print is a particularly important document of how the Meiji regime used the woodblock medium and the new institution of the illustrated newspaper to publicize its emerging political and religious calendar. The bright magentas, purples, and synthetic greens that distinguish the print are characteristic Meiji aniline pigments, recently arrived from Europe and rapidly adopted by the Tokyo print industry. The British Museum's impression entered the collection through the major mid-twentieth-century acquisitions of Japanese popular prints, and its presence in the Chōya shimbun context confirms Toshinobu's central role in the newspaper's lavishly illustrated journalism of the late 1870s.