Nobukazu | Comparison of Famous Places in the East

Yosai Nobukazu (1872–1944)

Yosai Nobukazu had a front row seat to the changes that swept Meiji Japan at the end of the 19th Century, and he depicted them energetically so the world could marvel.

Born in 1872, just after the Meiji Restoration led to the end of the 250-year Shogunate, he is perhaps the best-known student of Yoshu Chikanobu. In his graceful and colorful – and highly romanticized -- triptychs of court ladies the master’s influence is quite evident.

But in those turbulent times, the subtle joys of a life in court were not the order of the day. Japan went to war, first with China and then with Russia, and the public hungered for images of furious battles on land and sea. Yosai was among those Ukiyoe artists who, finding their livelihoods threatened as woodblock prints lost favor, were happy to oblige. They turned their talents to propagandic and often fantastical war scenes.

But like so many Japanese woodblock print artists, he shouldn’t be pigeonholed. Yosai also produced numerous designs depicting the joys of life in Tokyo in that era, just as Western influences began to be commonplace. And he died in 1944, just before so much of his beloved Tokyo was destroyed by Allied bombings in World War II.