Popular representations of warriors in the nineteenth century differ from those of the eighteenth not only in number, but in kind. While warrior prints constituted only a small fraction of the total print production in the eighteenth century, by the mid-nineteenth, they seem to have outstripped even the bijin-ga genre, once the staple of ukiyo-e, in popularity. There were at least a dozen designers who made their names known predominantly as portrayers of warriors, and many who worked exclusively in this genre. The eighteenth century audience had a few favorite themes they were happy to see repeated again and again, predominantly from the Heike. These included the fan-shooting at Yashima, the woman warrior Tomoe Gozen, the death of Atsumori, and the exploits of Yoshitsune, with some prints also depicting Soga Monogatari and tales of Yorimasa from the Taiheiki. The mass public demand of the nineteenth century, however, had designers scouring old books for new heroic topics and inventing new means of representation to make the old stories come to life. And in so doing, the popular artists shaped a commoner's version of national history, with a strong strain of veneration for the warrior hero.

I would like to stress that the more important distinction between the warrior prints of these two periods is not merely in number or theme, but in approach. While not all the warrior works of the eighteenth century are as playful and layered in erotic meaning as those introduced in the previous section, there is an almost complete absence of this sort of trans-historical playfulness with the warrior in the nineteenth century. Instead, the designers focused their imagination on making the past come to life as melodrama and capturing national heroes in full color and glory. Warriors were not the objects of play and parody, but of respect and veneration. Furthermore, whereas almost all eighteenth century prints focused on individual warriors, the nineteenth saw war itself, the heat and chaos of battle, become in and of itself a major subject of representation. In these transformations, we can see a major alteration in the ideal of the masculine, from the soft, beautiful and cultured warriors favored by the eighteenth century (Atsumori, Yoshitsune, Tomoe Gozen), to tough, hairy and grizzled samurai, screaming and clawing as they fall in defeat. Fierce machismo was taking the place of the gentle, suave and stylish man of the town as the male ideal.

These new values were anything but a spontaneous birth, however, rather representing a shift in emphasis between two strands that had been part of ukiyo-e since its inception. Just as early kabuki is divided into wagoto and aragoto, the former the "soft" style that characterized the kamigata, the latter the "rough" style of Edo, so was there the same basic split within ukiyo-e, between the gentle, restrained images of women by Nishikawa Sukenobu and his Kyôto students on the one hand, and the exaggerated and explosive depictions of actors by the Edo-centered Torii School on the other. Likewise, there certainly were straightforward portraits of warriors in the early eighteenth century, as indeed there had been since the very first images were printed for mass-consumption in the mid-seventeenth, but not until close to the end of this century did these prints find enough favor in the marketplace to be produced in number. At this time, it was not the feminized or parodied warrior that the purchasers desired, but portraits of heroes with whom they could identify or sympathize, great warriors slaying their enemies, or being slain in a brave fight against impossible odds. The features of Yoshitsune toughened, and Atsumori all but dropped from public interest except for some kabuki depictions. In the middle of one of the longest periods of peace in Japanese history, respect for the way of the warrior revived.

This change is complex, and cannot be easily reduced to any single factor, neither a shift from Kamigata-centered to Edo-centered commoner culture, nor much less a sudden transformation in public tastes and ideals of masculinity. Other elements that may have influenced these transformations are a broadening in the audience for the popular print, and government censorship. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, print publishers, looking to expand their markets, began to have peddlers offer nishiki-e color prints, often those of inferior quality, in the countryside. This opening up of the market is said to have greatly affected the print, leading to a demand for increased production that consequently decreased the standards for quality of both designs and execution. Less considered than this artistic decline, however, are the possible effects of the broadened market on the subjects of the prints themselves. For while the urban audience had a sophisticated sense of humor and took the soft, suave lover as their ideal of masculinity, the countryside patrons had simpler tastes, and with the importance of hard, physical labor in their daily lives, certainly could not share the city dweller's view of what constituted manhood. I would suggest that the increased emphasis on straightforward depictions of warriors as ideals of manliness and heroism had much to do with this change in the print market, from an exclusively urban one, to one which incorporated the countryside.

A secondary factor that should not be left out of this account is government influence on and suppression of print makers and publishers. The Tokugawa administration twice cracked down on depictions of kabuki actors and Yoshiwara courtesans (in the 1790's and more harshly in the 1840's), and made a point in 1805 of punishing the famous popular artist Utamaro for his irreverent images of the warlord Hideyoshi. Its message seems to have hit home, for an enfeebled Utamaro died the following year, and his are the last such undisguised warrior parodies in ukiyo-e. Although the reforms of the 1790's did not forbid the depiction of courtesans and actors, as did those of the 1840's, they did nevertheless express contempt for these kinds of prints, and put certain limitations on them. Large head portraits {okubi-e) were prohibited, as was the use of a courtesan's name on her image, and certain lavish printing techniques. The 1840's reforms, by contrast, virtually assured the warrior print of success, by eliminating its main competition. With the two prime sources of ukiyo-e subject matter blocked, artists had no choice but to turn to landscapes, and classical or historical themes, as a way of finding their way around the censors. Warrior prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi and his many pupils flourished, and did not give ground even after the restrictions had been lifted. Though certainly not the sole cause in the shift of interest to warrior prints, the government's role in this change does deserve examination.

With this background in mind, I would like now to examine nineteenth century depictions of a few selected heroes from the Heike Monogatari, with an aim to clarifying the nature of this transformation in Japanese popular culture and its significance for Japanese modernity.

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