But long years of peace had not been kind to the samurai. Kyōsai’s parents would have disgusted Ieyasu: a woman of good samurai stock marrying a former rice merchant. At the bottom of the social pile were merchants, regarded as lowly because they traded in the fruits of other people’s labour rather than producing anything themselves.īy the 1830s, this settlement was falling apart. Serving these domains in various capacities was a highly stratified samurai class, which in turn stood above the country’s great mass of farmers and artisans. Ieyasu’s administration, or ‘shogunate’, imposed on Japan a settlement that turned his headquarters in Edo into the effective capital, supported by a patchwork of semi-independent feudal domains. Back in the early 1600s, Tokugawa Ieyasu had unified the country and secured appointment from the Emperor as ‘ shogun’: a military office (‘barbarianquelling generalissimo’) that made him de facto ruler of the country. Osaka and Edo owed their emergence to the previous 200 years of relative peace and prosperity. Kyoto’s landscape of shrines and temples, grand homes and gardens, testified to a thousand years of cultural pre-eminence by this point. This spring, art lovers in London have an unparalleled opportunity to discover his singular work, as one of the world’s foremost Kyōsai collections, privately owned by the art dealer Israel Goldman, graces the Royal Academy’s walls.įor someone of Kyōsai’s natural ability, born in 1831, there were probably only three places in Japan where it was worth growing up: Kyoto, Osaka and Edo.

His proficiency in a range of styles, enormous output and broad-minded approach as a teacher helped to ensure that his country made that journey with as much as possible of its rich artistic inheritance intact. His humour and highly trained talent led him to become one of the best-loved chroniclers of Japan’s entry into the modern world. Kyōsai was among the greatest of them: a pioneering caricaturist who also produced technically brilliant paintings and illustrations.

Images were an important means of conveying news and views in this era, and the prizing of virtue and public conformity offered dry tinder to which an enterprising satirist might profitably hold a match. Whatever his misdemeanour, Kyōsai was arrested on the spot.Ī period of hard prison time followed, hurting Kyōsai’s health but not his reputation. One of his works was said to have employed a vivid sexual metaphor, in which case he perhaps compounded his offence of ‘insulting important people’ – and in public, no less – with the inflammation of moral sensibilities. The precise charges made against Kyōsai remain a mystery, but a rumour persisted that he had taken as his theme that evening Japanese political and commercial humiliation at the hands of predatory and entitled Westerners. He could not, as a result, recall the image in question. To be sure, Kyōsai had been drunk as well, having attended a shogakai: a commercially organised party at which painters and calligraphers produced spontaneous creations, and which were not known for their seriousness or sobriety ( Calligraphy and Painting Party (Shogakai), 1876–78 below).

Unlike most whose evenings ended in this way, his offence was not drunkenness, violence or theft.

In 1870 Kawanabe Kyōsai enjoyed a night out so raucous that its final stop was a Tokyo jail cell. His books include Japan Story: In Search of a Nation, 1850 to the Present (Allen Lane). Christopher Harding is Senior Lecturer in Asian History at the University of Edinburgh.

Rare paintings swords and souls