Noriko Brandl, Nora Gesellmann and Sepp Linhart (University of Vienna, Institute for East Asian Studies/ Japanese Studies)
The Tenpo reforms during the 1840s close to the end of the Japanese seclusion period imposed various restrictions and prohibitions addressing the ukiyoe world. The reforms had a major impact on the production of woodblock prints. The popularity of the prevailing subject matters until the reform period like courtesans and actors gradually faded and the new genre of caricature ranging from political satire (fushiga) to simple comic prints (giga) without hidden messages behind the work emerged. This genre has remained outside the major scope of ukiyoe research mainly due to the rare accessibility of the prints. A majority of the prints in question are containing text and inscriptions that are difficult to read. The texts as well as the illustrations are encoded in a way which makes the interpretation of the prints particularly demanding. Former studies on ukiyoe have focused on the aesthetic qualities of the objects and therefore caricatures have long been neglected by scholars but are now undergoing reappraisal. During the last two decades research on subgenres such as earthquake-pictures, measles-pictures, Yokohama pictures or ken-pictures, as well as work on caricatures by single artists like Kuniyoshi, Kyosai or Kiyochika was carried out. It will be questioned whether the caricatures intended for mass consumption can be read as a change in the political consciousness of the Edo townspeople before and after the Meiji restoration. Finally, attention will be given to the equally neglected caricatures of the Sino and the Russo-Japanese War which might have contributed to the outcome of xenophobic tendencies among the Japanese. The project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) aims at compiling a database encompassing over 1500 woodblock prints which were commercially published between the Tenpo reforms (1842) and the Russo-Japanese War (1905). The trilingual database (in German, English and Japanese) will be made available online in order to make an important genre in ukiyoe readily accessible to the public as well as to scholars around the world.