About This Print

This print depicts the return of Shogun Iemochi to Edo from Kyoto on the battleship Jundō-maru which is being protected by various deities.

Source: Demon of Painting: the Art of Kawanabe Kyōsai, Timothy Clark, British Museum Press, 1993, p. 114
In the spring of 1863, Shogun Iemochi (ruled 1858–66) was ordered to Kyoto to confer with the court on how and when the ‘foreign barbarians’ should be expelled from the country.  This was the first time in more than 100 years that the shogun had been summoned by the court in this way and was a high point of influence of the ‘revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians’ (sonnō jōi) faction.  Iemochi left Edo with a huge retinue on the thirteenth day of the second month, and arrived at Nijō Castle in Kyoto on the fourth day of the following month.

Kyōsai, like most inhabitants of Edo, would have wished the shogun success in his political mission, upon which rested the future economic prosperity of the city.  In the seventh month, 1863, he designed a triptych showing deities protecting the return of the Shogun to Edo in the battleship Jundō-maru¹, an event that had occurred the previous month.

¹ The Jundō-maru was a 360-horsepower ironclad paddle steamer, built in Britain, and purchased by the Bakufu for $150,000. [Source: Samurai Revolution: The Dawn of Modern Japan Seen Through the Eyes of the Shogun's Last Samurai, Romulus Hillsborough, Rutland and Tuttle Publishing, 2014, p. 218.]

Commemorating the Occasion
Source: "Kawanabe Kyosai and Toyohara Kunichika," by Shigeru Oikawa appearing in Time Present and Time Past: Images of a Forgotten Master: Toyohara Kunichika (1835-1900), by Amy Reigle Newland, Hotei Publishing, 1999, p. 39. 
While this print depicts the return of the Shogun from Kyoto back to Edo after his meeting with Emperor Komei (1831-1867), it was the Shogun's trip to Kyoto that was most portrayed in woodblock prints.  At least thirteen artists, including Kyosai, were commissioned by approximately sixteen publishers to design prints commemorating the occasion.  Kyosai alone designed twenty-eight prints for the series.