Examining the Woodcut Prints of Kobayashi Kiyochika

A woodcut print by Kiyochika Kobayashi shows the Russian Czar Nicholas II experiencing a nightmare where the crushed Russian forces, in the forms of modern military technology, return home defeated from the war.

Although “by the time Admiral Tōgō dispatched the Baltic Fleet woodblock war prints had all but disappeared from the scene”[1] in the early 20^th century for Japanese printing, famous printers such as Kobayashi Kiyochika still played important roles in reinventing Japan’s outlook on the West from a powerful and mysterious entity that “dazzled [Japan] by [its] material greatness”[2] to a much more mundane rival for power that the ascending Japanese nation could compete evenly with and even conquer. In prints such as that shown here, we find the great Russian Czar Nicholas II being reduced to a sickly old man in bed, greatly diminishing the frighteningly powerful images of the West of earlier times such as the depictions of Perry’s black ships that we have encountered in class. The accompanying Japanese text makes a mockery of the supposed innumerable defeats of the Russians at the hands of the Japanese, such that even the Czar is surprised by the Russian forces’ battered state and can do very little but accept defeat and leave his bruised army alone. Textual updates in prints contributed to the newsfeed that the public consumed, and when laced with nationalist sentiment as in Kiyochika’s work it served as another step in Japan’s imperialist movement. Andrew Gordon notes that “Japan’s expanding power and prestige [and] the move to empire … [were] propelled by connected logics of military power, competitive geopolitics, expanding trade and investment, as well as nativist ideals of Japanese supremacy”[3]. The sale and circulation of prints and postcards, then, became a crucial connecting factor in reinforcing the people’s pride and confidence in their nation, setting the stage for Japan’s aggression in the 20^th century.