Utagawa Yoshitora

Who They Were

Utagawa Yoshitora (歌川芳虎, うたがわ よしとら) was a designer of ukiyo-e (浮世絵, うきよえ — "pictures of the floating world", the woodblock print tradition of early modern Japan) and an illustrator of books and newspapers. He worked in Edo, the city renamed Tokyo in 1868, and his career ran from about 1850 to about 1880. He was the oldest pupil of Utagawa Kuniyoshi, one of the most celebrated print designers of the late Edo period.

Yoshitora's range was wide: warriors, kabuki actors, beautiful women, and foreigners. He was also unusually prolific, producing more than sixty print series and illustrating more than a hundred books. His life is bracketed by the years 1836 and 1880, and he was born in the Tenpō era (天保, てんぽう), in its sixth year.

Life and Career

Yoshitora was born in Edo, the city that became Tokyo. He entered the studio of Utagawa Kuniyoshi and, as the oldest of Kuniyoshi's pupils, trained alongside artists who would shape the final decades of ukiyo-e. His earliest known work dates to around 1850.

In 1849 he produced a print titled Dōke musha: Miyo no wakamochi (道化武者 御代の若餅), which translates roughly as "Funny Warriors: Our Ruler's New Year's Rice Cakes." The image shows three of Japan's most famous warlords — Oda Nobunaga, Akechi Mitsuhide, and Toyotomi Hideyoshi — pounding mochi (餅, もち — glutinous rice cakes) for the shōgun Tokugawa Ieyasu. A poem by Sawaya Kōkichi accompanied the print: "Kimi ga yo wo tsuki katametari haru no mochi," meaning "Tamping down the reign firm and solid like spring rice cakes."

The authorities read the print as a satire on political power. Censors had Yoshitora manacled for fifty days as punishment. Soon afterwards he was expelled from Kuniyoshi's studio, possibly because of the same print. He did not stop working; he continued to produce illustrations at a high rate.

From the 1860s, as Japan opened to foreign trade and modernised rapidly, Yoshitora turned out Yokohama-e (横浜絵, よこはまえ — prints depicting the foreign residents and imported novelties of the treaty port of Yokohama). He may never have seen the foreign scenes he drew. He also collaborated on a number of landscape series. In the Meiji period, which began in 1868, he worked for newspapers as well. The last of his known works appeared in 1882.

Why They Matter

Yoshitora belongs to the last working generation of ukiyo-e artists, and his career tracks the collapse of the world that produced the medium. He trained under Kuniyoshi in the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate, was punished by its censors, and then spent his maturity recording the foreigners and fashions of the port city of Yokohama. Few artists span that transition so completely.

The 1849 rice-cake print is a small landmark in the history of Japanese political satire. Depicting the unifiers of Japan as cooks serving the ruling shōgun, and captioning the scene with a poem about tamping the realm solid, was read by the censors as an attack on authority — and punished accordingly. The fifty days in manacles, and the expulsion from Kuniyoshi's studio that followed, mark one of the sharper collisions between an ukiyo-e designer and the state.

His output is equally significant in bulk. Over sixty print series and more than a hundred illustrated books make him one of the most productive figures of his generation, and a major source for how Japanese city dwellers in the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s pictured warriors, actors, women and Westerners.

The Name in Japanese

The full name is written 歌川芳虎. It is read うたがわ よしとら in kana, and romanised as Utagawa Yoshitora. The family name comes first, as is standard in Japanese.

歌 (うた, uta) — "song" or "poem." This is the first character of 歌川 (うたがわ, Utagawa), the surname.

川 (がわ, gawa) — "river." Read alone the character is kawa; inside a compound it voices to gawa. The surname Utagawa therefore means something like "song river."

芳 (よし, yoshi) — "fragrant," "aromatic," also carrying the sense of "virtuous" or "fine." This is the first character of the given name.

虎 (とら, tora) — "tiger."

The name 芳虎 (Yoshitora) is a studio name in the Utagawa tradition. Kuniyoshi, Yoshitora's teacher, signed himself 国芳 (Kuniyoshi), and the 芳 character passed from master to pupil as a mark of belonging to the school. The same character appears in the names of many Kuniyoshi students. The 歌川 of the surname is likewise shared across the whole Utagawa lineage, the largest and longest-lived school of ukiyo-e print design.

The tiger in the given name is not incidental. Tigers were a favourite subject in Japanese painting, and the animal appears frequently in warrior prints and in the work of the Utagawa school.

Legacy

Yoshitora's known works end in 1882, two years after the close of the period usually assigned to his life. His son, Nagashima Shungyō, also became an artist, carrying the family's connection to print design into another generation.

His reputation rests on three things: the satirical 1849 print and the punishment it drew; the sheer volume of his output across print series and illustrated books; and his Yokohama-e, which preserve one Japanese artist's imagining of the foreigners who arrived in the treaty ports. Those images were produced at speed for a curious urban market, and they show as much about how Japanese print buyers wanted to see the West as about the West itself.

Because Yoshitora worked in newspapers during the Meiji period, his career also documents the moment when the woodblock print began to give way to mechanical printing and mass-circulation news. He is remembered as a prolific, versatile, and occasionally reckless figure — an artist who paid a price for a joke about rice cakes and kept working anyway.