It is delightful to see the first exhibition in the West devoted to the prolific, yet relatively under-studied Meiji artist Yôshû Chikanobu (1838–1893). To date, Chikanobu has been overshadowed by the popular artists of the time, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–1892), Toyohara Kunichika (1835–1900), and Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847–1915). Although Chikanobu’s works are often discussed in books and journals, there has been no monograph or exhibition devoted to him in Japan or in the West; thus both the exhibition and accompanying catalogue are significant contributions to the study of Chikanobu’s work and to Meiji prints in general.

The exhibition opened in August 2006 at Scripps College’s Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery. In the catalogue, curator Bruce Coats recounts the history of the college’s Japanese print collection, which began with a gift of a single print in 1944. Enthusiastic donors gave the college the core of the Chikanobu collection in 1993, including the set of fifty prints of the 1884 series Setsugekka (Snow, Moon, Flowers) and the fifty prints of the 1886 set of Azuma nishiki chûya kurabe (Eastern Brocades: Day and Night Compared [I feel the translation should be Azuma Brocades: Day and Night Compared, as Azuma is a rhetorical name for Tokyo or Edo.]). Over the last fifteen years endowment funds helped the school amass over 230 more prints by Chikanobu. The development of this substantial collection created the opportunity to exhibit and document the prints. The catalogue is organized chronologically into four sections: Chikanobu’s early work in the 1870–80s, followed by his output from the late 1880s, the early 1890s, and the final years of 1895–1906. The series Setsugekka, Azuma nishiki chûya kurabe, and Mitate junishi (Parody of the Twelve Zodiac Animals) are highlighted. Essays contributed by Joshua Mostow, Allen Hockley, Kyoko Kurita, and Bruce Coats discuss Chikanobu’s work in the context of the social and historical movements of the time. Grouping his work chronologically provides readers with clear overviews of the artist’s themes and styles.

In his essays, “Chikanobu, an Overview of his Life and Works” and “Chiyoda Inner and Outer Palace Scenes,” Coats traces Chikanobu’s work in the order of its creation. As there has been little research on Chikanobu to date, Coats bases his essay on a short biography and an obituary published in Tokyo newspapers in 1912, as well as on a Jôetsu City Museum brochure published in 1978.

After succeeding his father as a gokenin-ranked samurai of the once-powerful feudal lord of the Sakakibara domain, Chikanobu remained faithful to the Tokugawa shogunate and fought against the reforms that resulted in the institution of the new Meiji government. Those efforts were in vain, and after the new bureaucracy was established, Chikanobu became an independent artist in 1871 at the age of thirty-three. After reviewing the few records available that document Chikanobu’s life, Coats considers the historical events of the time and compares Chikanobu’s work with the better-understood artists Kunichika, Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861), and Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1864), all of whom were his teachers. Chikanobu’s subject matter was wide-ranging. Some of it was based upon recent history and current events, including the Satsuma Rebellion, the activities of the imperial family in akae (red prints), the celebration of the Constitution, and Sino-Japanese War prints. In addition, Chikanobu depicted more familiar subjects, such as classical literature, warriors, history, kabuki, and a series representing a new pleasure quarter in Edo. However, as Coats shows, Chikanobu’s best work was in the bijinga genre, showing beautiful women in the close-up (okubi-e) style.

In his essay “Setsugekka: Snow, Moon, Flowers,” Mostow discusses this particular set by comparing it with the collaboration between Kuniyoshi, Kunisada, and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) in Ogura nazorae hyakunin isshu (Parody Ogura One Hundred Poems) of 1846–48, and with Yoshitoshi’s Tsuki hyakushi (One Hundred Aspects of the Moon) produced from 1885–1886. Although censorship regulations established under the Tenpô Reforms (1841–1843) had not yet been completely lifted, Mostow regards Chikanobu’s treatment of Setsugekka as “Nippon-centric” because he limited the theme to Japanese topics, while Nazorae and Tsuki hyakushi included Chinese themes as well as animals such as a fox from a Japanese folktale and a monkey from Chinese literature. Mostow also interprets Setsugekka as a collection of bijin-ga, although the fact that six out of the fifty prints do not depict a female begs the question. Mostow points out that during the Edo period bijin-ga images were generally published as a set and that the figures were depicted in contemporary fashion. In contrast to the Edo tradition, Chikanobu mixed female with male figures in Setsugekka, and the costumes represented different eras (although this was not entirely consistent); for example, if the setting was the Heian period, figures were depicted in Heian attire. Chikanobu also altered conventions by adding female figures and by removing identifiable signs of professions. This trend of emphasizing women’s roles as conservators of traditional culture, Mostow argues, would be succeeded in the “Japanese painting” or Nihonga genre with its emphasis on women shown in conventional settings.

In his essay “New Age Warriors: Redeploying the Heroic Ethos in the Late Meiji Period,” Hockley looks at how Chikanobu changed the genre of the warrior print to express particular values during the Meiji period. Subjects from the medieval epics (gunki), he argues, gained popularity in Kabuki and print culture during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In contrast to the conventional scholarship holding that the Kansei (1789–1801) and Tenpô (1830–1844) censorship edicts shifted the emphasis from actor prints to warrior and landscape prints, Hockley contends that the surge in warrior prints during the nineteenth century was caused by the dramatic improvement in literacy instigated by the emergence of the “reading book” (yomihon—a new type of illustrated semi-fictional story) and rental libraries (kashihon-ya). Hockley further argues that Westernization brought the end to censorship, and that contemporary events such as the Satsuma Rebellion (1877) and the war with China (1894–1895) provided a new group of rising artists, including Chikanobu, with the opportunity to revitalize and redefine the warrior prints. Hockley explains that Chikanobu’s shift to more conventional heroic warrior prints toward the end of his career resulted from a broader societal nostalgia and desire to reinvigorate lost traditions in the face of Westernization. Thus, Chikanobu put his art on parallel with Meiji sensibilities in reproducing the heroic stories of the past.

Kyoko Kurita studies the relationship between popular literature (gesaku) and Chikanobu’s response to the literary movement of the Meiji period in her essay “Picturing Women’s Spirit: Chikanobu’s Prints and Meiji Literature.” Illustrations were an important component of Japanese book culture; however, by the end of the nineteenth century, books were often produced unillustrated. To relate the literary and artistic movements of the time, Kurita begins with a comparison of writing by Mori Ôgai (1862–1922) and Chikanobu. Citing similar situations in which both artists had a choice of reporting factual or fictionalized stories, Kurita says that they opted to fictionalize their treatment of journalistic stories, particularly avoiding the portrayal of nude scenes, as an aesthetic decision. Kurita argues that there is an incongruity in Chikanobu’s prints between the factual information written in the cartouche and the visual representation; however, she states that this duality is a cultural phenomenon commonly seen in literature as well as in early Meiji society—for instance, a man wearing a kimono and a bowler.

As popular modes of writing shifted from didactic stories to journalistic ones, Chikanobu also modified his book illustrations to produce a greater emphasis upon realistic characterizations. When literature began to emphasize the psychological aspects of human life, Chikanobu, too, moved to capture the spirit of a new generation of women. As the relationship between imagination and reality (sojitsu) became emphasized in the aesthetic movement in literature, Chikanobu began using the komae format—using a circle to depict an imaginary world—to parallel this literary movement. When literature started redefining beauty, coinciding with the publication of the short story True Beauty (Shinbijin) by Kôda Rohan (1867–1947), Chikanobu followed its lead in his print series of the same name. Ironically, Chikanobu’s nostalgic depictions of women in classic themes became the representative images of Japan to the West at the end of the nineteenth century.

This well-researched catalogue illustrated with superb images brings new insights to Chikanobu’s life and work. However, there are many mistranslations of the captions and resulting misinterpretations of the prints; the entries, too, are unevenly written. For example, Mitate-e Shochikubai no uchi: Matsutake gari is rendered incorrectly as Inside a Pine-Bamboo-Plum Parody: Pine Mushrooms. This may be better translated as Parody: From Pine-Bamboo-Plum: Mushroom Gathering. In this print, Chikanobu represents the auspicious motifs of pine (matsu) and bamboo (take) from the standard grouping of pine, bamboo, and plum. In the parody, Chikanobu, instead of using the standard combinations to read matsutake, used a phonetic equivalent of the word for mushroom, matsutake, by using the Chinese characters matsu (pine) and take (mushroom instead of bamboo). In Japanese culture, the parody of mushroom gathering implies men hunting, and unfortunately Coats missed this hidden meaning. Another problem that appears in the catalogue has to do with the sequence of the prints in the Snow, Moon and Flowers series. The rationale for the sequence order is unexplained, and thus seems random; a more logical method would have been to arrange the snow, moon, and flowers as a group in chronological order.

These and other questions raised in the catalogue demonstrate how important further research will be for understanding Chikanobu in his own time. But Coats’s scholarly endeavor in introducing the heretofore relatively unresearched Chikanobu and his work is a significant, praiseworthy contribution to the field. It should inspire others to further studies of Chikanobu.