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art, asian art museum, edo, japanese woodblock prints, meijo, san francisco, ukiyo-e

Review: Yoshitoshi's Strange Tales
In 1863, the fourteenth Tokugawa Shogun, Tokugawa Iemochi (1846-1866), traveled from Edo (modern Tokyo) to Kyoto for an audience with the Japanese Emperor. Taiso Yoshitoshi (1839-1892), an Edo-based printmaker, illustrated Iemochi’s journey in his print, “Kanasugi Bridge at Shibaura.” The print (part of a series featuring famous views of the Tokaido) depicts the Shogun’s men in motion, walking towards Kyoto on the highway constructed by Tokugawa Iyeyasu in 1603.

Not since the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu, had a shogun made the journey from Edo to Kyoto. Though Kyoto remained the imperial seat, the Tokugawa Shogunate chose Edo as their capital. For over two hundred and fifty years, Edo ruled Japan.
Ten years after Commodore Perry’s “black ships,” Kyoto was in crisis. Pro-Imperialist forces, many of them ronin (masterless samurai), openly engaged the Shogun’s forces in combat, generating chaos in Kyoto’s streets. Beset by corruption and social unrest, the Tokugawa Shogunate (1600-1868) was slowly slipping from power. Perry’s visit simply accelerated the Shogunate’s fall. By the 1850s, the Tokugawa Shogunate’s legendary peace had been broken.

When Iemochi traveled to Kyoto, even the Emperor could not guarantee his safety. A small but powerful cadre of men, most of them from the samurai class, agitated for the Shogun’s removal. Iemochi, they argued, was weak and inept, too quick to cave under foreign pressure. Japan needed strength, and strength could only be derived through national unity, through a forceful centralized government. In 1868, after almost fifteen years of internal strife and civil war, the Tokugawa Shogunate fell, and the Meiji Restoration began.

“Kanasugi Bridge at Shibaura” is included in the Asian Art Museum’s exhibition, “Yoshitoshi’s Strange Tales: Woodblock Prints from Edo to Meiji” (May 26 to September 2, 2007). Woodblock prints are fragile and susceptible to fading and damage, so the exhibition features two rotations of prints. “Kanasugi Bridge at Shibaura” appears in the second rotation. The exhibition’s curator, John Stevenson, emphasizes Yoshitoshi’s penchant for Japanese folklore and history, and the artist’s status as a limnal figure, poised between Edo and Meiji sensibilities. The prints on display at the Asian Art Museum illustrate, for Stevenson, “a traditional culture moving at breakneck speed into the modern world.” During Yoshitoshi’s lifetime, photographs and lithographs supplanted woodblock prints. Although the woodblock print enjoyed a brief revival in the 1870s, with the expansion of Japan’s newspaper market, this traditional form would ultimately be supplanted by photo-lithography. Changing tastes, as much as changing technologies, accounted for this transformation. Readers came to prefer photographic verisimilitude over the woodblock print’s stylized look. By the end of the nineteenth century, the woodblock print ceased to play an integral role in Japanese mass culture.

Yoshitoshi was born in Edo in 1839, only fourteen years before Commodore Matthew Perry’s black ships arrived. Yoshitoshi came of age during one of Japan’s most turbulent periods. The son of a wealthy merchant who bought his way into the samurai class, he apprenticed with the printmaker Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861). Like Kuniyoshi, Yoshitoshi favored historical narratives. And like his teacher, Yoshitoshi demonstrated an unusual interest in the violent, the macabre, and the supernatural. Government censorship accounts for Yoshitoshi’s interest in ghost stories and historical episodes. All woodblock prints were examined by government censors before publication. Artists, unable to directly critique the Shogunate, turned to allegory. Kuniyoshi employed ghost stories and folklore as allegories for contemporary events, and Yoshitoshi, following his teacher’s example, employed this format to as a platform for political commentary.

One scholar has described Yoshitoshi’s work as “violence made vivid,” though as he matured, he veered away from overt violence and developed a gift for capturing tension, or what Henri Cartier-Bresson has called “the decisive moment.” During the 1860s and 70s, Yoshitoshi frequently created newspaper illustrations, and his version of Hiroshige’s “Kanasugi Bridge at Shibaura,” though included in his Tokaido Highway series, may have began as a newspaper assignment. Many of Yoshitoshi’s most memorable prints explore the tension that marked late-nineteenth-century Japanese society.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan faced great external stress, as Western forces—especially the United States and the United Kingdom—pressured the shogun to “open” Japan and end the shogunate’s embargo against Western visitation and settlement. For over two centuries, the Tokugawa Shogunate limited Western visitors (whether traders or government envoys) to Nagasaki, and circumscribed exchanges between the Westerners and the Japanese.

Westerners could not travel freely in Japan, nor could they purchase land or directly engage in trade. Yet Japan was not truly isolated. The average Japan citizen had access to Western goods and, to a lesser extent, to Western ideas. Interest in Western art and culture led to the establishment of rangaku, or “Western Studies,” and artists and writers experimented with Western motifs. Yoshitoshi’s teacher, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, designed a series of prints (“Twenty-Four Chinese Paragons of Filial Piety”) based on Baroque motifs. Kuniyoshi directly lifted elements from Western sources (most often Dutch or Italian prints) to illustrate Japanese parables. Nineteenth-century printmakers experimented with single-point perspective and with European treatments of volume and composition. By the mid-nineteenth-century, no edict could stem the tide of Westernization.

The Japanese government’s greatest fear, however, was not Westernization, but colonization. European and American actions in Asia gave no great assurance. The nineteenth century represented the high point of European colonial activity in the Asia Pacific, and Japanese imperialists justified their actions by invoking memories of such unsavory European and American actions as China’s Opium Wars and the American occupation of the Philippines.

Yoshitoshi documented the turbulence and violence that culminated in the Meiji Restoration. “Ban Dan’emon Rows Past a Western Paddle-Steamer,” from Yoshitoshi’s One Hundred Aspects of Battle (1868), dramatizes the battle of Ueno, where two thousand Tokugawa loyalists faced the Emperor’s imperial army. The Emperor’s forces, armed with modern equipment, massacred the loyalists. In this print, the samurai Ban Dan’emon rows past a large paddle-boat, and “tradition” makes a futile last stand against “modernity.” Ban Dan’emon could serve as the artist’s doppelganger, for like Ban Dan’emon, Yoshitoshi was a traditionalist. With the Kabuki actor Danjuro IX, Yoshitoshi formed the Kyukokai (Society for Research into the Past), a group devoted to preserving Japan’s cultural heritage. But the Kyokokai’s attempts at counter-Westernization were as futile as the battle of Ueno. Like China’s Boxer Rebellion, where thousands of Chinese faced firearms with nothing but traditional Chinese martial arts, the Kyokokai were nothing but the romantic remnants of a passing order. Yoshitoshi’s most moving prints exploit these moments of extreme tension in modern Japanese history, these moments just before the turn, when the story might still take a different route.

“Kanasugi Bridge at Shibaura” exists in such an unstable equilibrium. The horse, the standard, and the umbrella form an isosceles triangle, weighted towards the print’s right edge. Beneath, the men form a steady, unbroken band, marching with their backs turned to a narrow isthmus. Contemporary audiences would have recognized the geography, and understood immediately that the Shogun’s men were headed south, away from Edo.

The shogun does not move. Others come to him. For centuries, the daimyo, or lords, traveled to Edo to pay court to the shogun. Twice a year, daimyo from all over Japan crossed the bridge at Shibaura. These processions were said to number into the tens of thousands, all traveling under their master’s standard. Only this time, the men belong to the shogun, and they are traveling south. The old order has been torn asunder.

Yoshitoshi’s audiences would have recognized Yoshitoshi’s print as a reworking of an 1857 Hiroshige print bearing the same title. Yoshitoshi has carefully preserved Hiroshige’s composition, almost point-for-point. In Yoshitoshi’s version, we find the same mass of bodies occupying the lower left and the same arrangement of trees and buildings on a narrow spit of land. In both prints, a small sailboat appears on the horizon, just behind the willow tree. Yoshitoshi has even preserved the fisherman in the midground, and the umbrella-like manto (a type of ceremonial standard) on the right edge. In Yoshitoshi’s print, however, the fisherman is transformed from a bystander (oaring his boat, oblivious to the procession crossing the bridge) to a witness (alert, captivated by the even unfolding before him).

Hiroshige’s “Kanasugi Bridge and Shibaura” depicts two groups of Buddhist pilgrims, one just setting out for the temple of Honmonji in Ikegami (a location eight miles southwest of Tokyo), and the other just returning to Edo. Hiroshige depicts an annual pilgrimage, one that has occurred yearly since the thirteenth century. The pilgrims, followers of the sage Nichiren, commemorate his death in the tenth month, during a festival known as Oeshiki.

Each year, thousands of believers made the pilgrimage from Edo to Honmonji, carrying poles and banners, chanting sutras, and beating drums. Hiroshige’s print seethes with activity, as banners and small printed “hand towels” flutter in the wind, breaking the horizon. Below, amongst the pilgrims’ hats, we observe lifted “fan drums” (uchiwa-daiko) and drumsticks. Festive reds, yellows, and purples dominate the foreground.

Yoshitoshi’s print, in contrast, is markedly static. The mood is decidedly sober. While Hiroshige arranged his banners and poles at rakish angles, creating strong diagonals throughout the print, Yoshitoshi’s samurai carry their banners with discipline. Hiroshige’s lively diagonals have been replaced by strong verticals. The pilgrims’ fluttering banners have disappeared. The samurai, unlike the pilgrims, walk in neatly ordered rows. Their hats, unlike those of Hiroshige’s pilgrims, are arranged in an unbroken line. The men’s uniforms are neat and sharp (observe the sharp corners on the overcoats), their postures tense. Only the horse betrays any liveliness, high-stepping between the columns. Yoshitoshi has reworked Hiroshige’s print so that things are not in their right place. Yoshitoshi’s choice to base his image of the shogun’s journey on Hiroshige’s earlier masterpiece gives the moment a poignancy, and pathos, that underscores the event’s magnitude. Yoshitoshi's decision to merge the Shogun’s journey with Hiroshige’s lucid depiction of Edo Japan displays the artist’s identification with the Shogun’s vanishing order. The print, so elegiac and still, memorializes Edo as it was, as it ought to be, as it never will be again.