About This Print

Nitta Yoshisada (1301-1338) offers his treasured sword to the sea gods and asks them for a safe passage for his army. The sea receded in answer to his prayers, enabling his soldiers to advance toward Kamakura.

The Story Depicted in the Print as Told by John Stevenson

Source: Yoshitoshi's One Hundred Aspects of the Moon, John Stevenson, Hotei Publishing, Netherlands 2001.
39.

Inamura Promontory moon at daybreak
Inamuragasaki no akebono no tsuki

Nitta no Yoshisada, the subject of this design, was general in the Hōjō army who found himself increasingly alienated from Takatoki, vicious leader of the Hojo clan.  When Emperor Go-Daigo escaped from exile in 1333 and challenged the Hojo, Yoshisada immediately declared support for him.  He raised a force of twenty thousand men and advanced on the Hōjō stronghold in Kamakura, a town by the sea.

As Yoshisada and his army marched along the narrow shore towards Kamakura, they found themselves trapped at Inamura Promontory.  The cliffs commanding the approaches to the city were heavily fortified, while enemy warships filled with archers threatened them from the sea.  Yoshisada ordered his army to halt while he prayed to the deities of the sea, finally casting his sword into the waves as a token of his sincerity.  As the sun rose, the tide ebbed far beyond normal, carrying with it the ships with their archers.  A wide expanse of sand was left, over which Yoshisada and his men were able to advance against Kamakura.  The Hojo power base was destroyed, and Emperor Go-Daigo entered Kyoto in triumph.

Yoshisada’s sleeves and trousers are decorated with magnificent dragonflies – perhaps this motif was chosen to suggest the ease with which a dragonfly skims over the water.  The round black object at Yoshisada’s waist is part of his scabbard.  His breastplate has been engraved with a complex design of a dragon, an appropriate reference to the Dragon King who ruled the sea, especially as the breastplate design includes the “ebb-and-flow” jewels that the Dragon King coveted.  Yoshitoshi’s audience would also have recognized in the dragon an allusion to Nitta Yoshisada’s famous dragon war-helmet, the identification of which takes up the first act of the Kabuki play Kanadehon chūshingura.

Yoshisada met his wife when he spied her through the hedge of her garden, playing a koto in the moonlight.  He immediately composed the poem,

            tears wet my sleeves
            the moon shines form above the clouds
            unaware of having caused them

Within a year the two were married. In 1338 Yoshisada was killed in battle and his head exhibited in Kyoto, which was now controlled by Go-Daigo’s enemies.  Unaware of this, his wife came to Kyoto to meet him, saw the head, and retired to a nunnery.

The dawn light in this design has been printed with a mercuric pigment which would have been orange when the print was first made.  It has since oxidized into the color of morning clouds.  Such pigments were expensive and used in the printing of the finest impressions of ukiyo-e.  It is assumed that they were chosen specifically for the shades given by their eventual oxidation, but western collectors did not always believe that the effect was intentional.  Instructions on the “care” of prints at the beginning of this century included directions on how to remove oxidation with strong chemicals, together with such ideas as boiling a print in tea to give it an aged look.
       

Image from Publisher's Bound Album (Issued shortly after Yoshitoshi's death)