About This Print

Seventeen world sovereigns (emperors, empresses, kings, queens and an American president) are portrayed along with Emperor Meiji and Empress Haruko (top of center panel), in this 1879 print, a time filled with visits from foreign sovereigns, as summarized in the below passage from Donald Keene's Emperorof Japan: Meiji and His World.¹ 

By this time [end of 1879] he [Emperor Meiji] was recognized as a “cousin”by the royal houses of Europe, and he accordingly received regular and prolongedvisits from foreign royalty. Apart from visits by foreign royalty, the emperor wasregularly informed of events in the lives of other monarchs. He respondedcorrectly to his “cousins,” sending messages of congratulations to Alfonso XIIof Spain on his remarriage and to the czar of Russia on his narrow escape fromassassins.

As with so many prints during the Meiji period that portrayed topical events, the important thing was not so much getting the facts right as conveying the nation's rise to power and, with this increasing power, the growing respect paid to its Imperial house. If we look closely at the artist's portrayals of royalty and rulers and the colored rectangular cartouches that list the personages being depicted, we notice a number of anomalies as further explained in the below table, the most interesting of which are the naming of the King of Portugal, King Dom Luis I at the time, as "King Frois" (フロイス国王), Frois being the name of the 16th-century Portuguese missionary Luis Frois, who arrived in Japan in 1563; depictions of the king and queen of "Madagarasu" (マダガラス), a country that has no known equivalent, but sounds strikingly like Madagascar, and the depictions of the king and queen of Switzerland (スイシル) which had become a republic in 1848 and had no recognized king and queen.