Taiheiki eiyūden by Yoshiiku Ochiai (Utagawa Yoshiiku), 1867

Black pen inscribes a pale green cover, its sharp wit at odds with the fragile mulberry pages within. It reads: “To Hugo, because — in spite of — & for instance. Louis. February, 1912.” (Fig 1). Opening up to the bold, bright, graphic depictions of Samurai with the heads of their enemies at their feet (Fig 2), you wonder what Hugo must have done.

Taiheiki eiyūden (Heroes from the chronicles of the Taiheiki) by Yoshiiku Ochiai (approx. 10 x 7 in, 25 x 18 cm) is a volume of fifty woodblock prints depicting Samurai warriors from 16th century Japan. This edition was published by Kikujudō and printed in 1867, though early dates for other artists’ take on the Taiheiki are recorded as early as 1847,¹ and the text² itself originally appeared in the 14th century. Notably, this edition’s year of publication marks the very end of the Edo period (1603-1868), when Japan kept its borders closed under the Tokugawa Shogunate. This era saw the rise of print technologies that could “disseminate information, instigate critique and aggravate or alleviate social tensions,” of the ruling power, with scholarly and commercial printing under a separate domain from the shogunate’s bureaucratic legislature.³

Edo period prints reflect many waves of censorship styles, which evolved in effort to control political critique and historical records. Various artists’ versions of the Taiheiki demonstrate these changes over time based on the numbers of censors’ seals that appear on their pages.⁴ For example, the illustration of Horio Mosuke Yoshiharu by Yoshiiku Ochiai (Fig 3) includes one single censor seal from 1867, whereas the version from twenty years earlier includes two (Fig 4). These marks (Fig 5) imply a loosening of bureaucratic control over Japanese military history as the Edo period began to draw to a close.

Artist Yoshiiku Ochiai, also known as Utagawa Yoshiiku (1833-1904), studied the ukiyo-e print style under Utagawa Kuniyoshi in the 1840’s.⁵ His career has been previously overlooked and labeled under the umbrellas of the late Utagawa school and post Meiji Restoration period, but recently his work has received more critical and scholarly attention, including a retrospective exhibition at the Ota Memorial Museum of Art in 2018.⁶ While ukiyo-e⁷ typically depict beautiful women, landscapes, kabuki theater, and other such scenes from the Floating World,⁸ Taiheiki eiyūden instead exemplifies the musha-e subgenre, which illustrates the warriors themselves rather than actor portrayals (Fig 6). Yoshiiku’s Samurai range from mid-battle stroke with bloody swords to mid-brushstroke with books in hand. Minimal context places each figure on horseback, in battle, in front of a window, or in a natural element among water, trees, animals, or sunshine according to the legend of that warrior.

The printing of each page ranges as much as its content. The woodblock prints include up to eight distinct colors, with as many as three different shades of blue (Fig 7). Some Samurai are conjured by masterfully small lines, their individual beard hairs and toes represented in sharp black overlay around their elaborately patterned shitagi (Fig 8). Others appear half-finished, their hakama a single swath of deep dark color and notably missing the customary decoration (Fig 9). Perhaps these prints missed a pass through the press.

The sheets of paper are folded on their long edges and printed with a different image on each side of the fold in fukoro toji style.⁹ The creased edge faces outwards and the interior, loose ends are punched with eight holes for thread to weave between and bind in a Japanese side stitch¹⁰. Holes often puncture characters on the prints, which would otherwise remain hidden were the binding itself not almost completely deteriorated on this specific item (Fig 10). Print quality remains high with little fading, which begs questions of whether the thread (Fig 11) was weak to begin with, if its twine remnants are the 1867 original, or if Hugo got a little too rough with his gift from Louis.

This copy of the Taiheiki eiyūden is arranged in the “ephemera” series of the Hugo Ballin Papers, documenting the collection of Hollywood director and Los Angeles muralist, Hugo Ballin (1879-1956).¹¹ The series includes personal notes, paintings, campaign books, press, and unit agreements for his films, though none so intimate as the note from Louis written on the back cover. A note in the item's catalog record suspects this may have been American poet Louis Untermeyer, but the identity has not been confirmed.¹²

While categorized as personal ephemera in context, this book is notably one of the few examples of ukiyo-e prints in UCLA’s Library Special Collections. Its appearance among early 20th century American magazine clippings and movie deals in Ballin’s collection demonstrates differences between media technologies of Edo-era Japan and 1920’s Los Angeles, yet the content has similarity at its core. As Ballin’s famous Griffith Observatory murals¹³ and the Taiheiki eiyūden confirm, we love to see the illustrated heroes of our histories.

¹ Kuniyoshi Project. http://www.kuniyoshiproject.com/Heroic%20Stories%20of%20the%20Taiheiki%20(S62),%20Part%20I.htm. Accessed 10 Feb. 2020. First recorded set of Taiheiki prints consisted of fifty vertical oban format (25 x 36 cm) by Ichiyusai Kunoiyoshi, published by Yamamoto Heikichi. ↩

² Varshavskaya, Elena. Heroes of the Grand Pacification: Kuniyoshi’s Taiheiki Eiyū Den. Hotei Publishing, 2006. brill.com, https://brill.com/view/title/13275. See for an English translation of Kuniyoshi’s Taiheiki ↩

³ Davis, Julie Nelson. “The Trouble with Hideyoshi: Censoring Ukiyo-e and the Ehon Taikōki Incident of 1804.” Japan Forum, vol. 19, no. 3, Sept. 2007, pp. 281–315. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, doi:10.1080/09555800701579933. ↩

⁴ Varshavskaya, 14 ↩

⁵ Ochiai Yoshiiku | 太田記念美術館 Ota Memorial Museum of Art. http://www.ukiyoe-ota-muse.jp/exhibition-eng/ochiai-yoshiiku. Accessed 7 Feb. 2020.

Ochiai Yoshiiku - Ukiyo-e Search. https://ukiyo-e.org/artist/ochiai-yoshiiku. Accessed 6 Feb. 2020.
Prints with images available online

“Utagawa Yoshiiku.” Wikipedia, 19 July 2018. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Utagawa_Yoshiiku&oldid=851037368.
Additional information on the artist ↩

⁶ Bell, David. Ukiyo-e Explained. Global Oriental, 2004, p. 17. ↩

⁷ Davis, Julie Nelson. Partners in Print: Artistic Collaboration and the Ukiyo-e Market. University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2015, p. 2.
”The term ukiyo drew originally from a Buddhist homophone that described human existence as transient and painful. By the seventeenth century the word had been appropriated and transformed (with new kanji characters) to describe the ephemerality of pleasure.” ↩

⁸ Ibid, 3.
“As a proper noun, Floating World was employed to denote specific places — the kabuki theater, the pleasure quarters, the sumo competition sites, celebrated places, and others — while as a common noun it connoted the attitude of drifting through the world in pursuit of diversion.” ↩

⁹ Cubé, Caroline. Research Guides: Flash Exhibits in Library Special Collections: Past Flash Exhibits 2017 - 2018. https://guides.library.ucla.edu/c.php?g=390460&p=4541812. Accessed 20 Feb. 2020. ↩

¹⁰ Eng, Tiffany. “INTRO TO BINDING: JAPANESE STAB BINDING TUTORIAL (Flexible Cover with Three-Hole Stitching).” West Dean, 26 Oct. 2014, https://www.westdean.org.uk/study/school-of-conservation/blog/books-and-library-materials/intro-to-binding-japanese-stab-binding-tutorial-flexible-cover-with-three-hole-stitching. ↩

¹¹ Cubé, Caroline. “Finding Aid for the Hugo Ballin Papers, 1890-1956.” Online Archive of California, 1997, https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/ft9g50098d/. ↩

¹² Ochiai, Yoshiiku, et al. Taiheiki Eiyūden. 1867, https://catalog.library.ucla.edu/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=8483236. ↩

¹³ “Griffith Observatory - Hugo Ballin Murals.” Griffith Observatory, http://www.griffithobservatory.org/exhibits/centralrotunda_hugoballinmurals.html. Accessed 20 Feb. 2020. ↩

Dianne Weinthal

For documentation on this project, personnel, technical information, see Documentation. For contact email: drucker AT gseis.ucla.edu.