What did the woodblock print of a warrior offer to the common man in the late Edo Period that the staples of the popular print, the actor and courtesan print, no longer could? Clearly there is a different form of desire invested (quite literally) in the purchase of picture of a hero from the historical past, rather than a celebrity of the present. The print of the woodblock warrior offered an excitement, unlike yakusha-e or bijin-ga, neither aesthetic nor sexual, but historical, a link with past greatness that offered the promise of one's own involvement in it, as national history. Unlike other genres of ukiyo-e, which emphatically emphasized the immediate, changing world, the warrior woodblock was backward-looking, but as such, could provide stability of identity. The heroes of the past defined what one could and should be in the present. The link to them was through nation, and the idea of shared national character. It was not just anyone fighting on the battlefield, but one's own ancestors, the people who through these actions "made us what we are today". By depicting various historical and legendary figures and exploits, the popular artists of the nineteenth century were disseminating a shared version of national history.

But there was a clear danger in too easy and literal an identification with the idealized heroic warrior who fought valiantly to the last arrow. Thrilling to the action in these prints, identifying with their heroes, the purchasers could participate in a sanctified experience of war, experience the raw power and never-say-die posturing of the warrior without having actually to face the realities of pain, loss and death. Becoming one with these heroes through these fantasies of continuous national history meant that to be Japanese was to be of such disposition as they, so that the idealization of bravery popularized in these prints by the mid-Meiji Era had become the proscriptive norm. Very quickly the warrior print format is taken over by the Meiji Government, who sponsored artists to create popular prints of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, showing the bravery of contemporary Japanese soldiers. The never-say-die ideal located in the past and enjoyed in fantasies of identification with historical heroes had thus become a commandment for the present, and the very nature of the Japanese people. To be Japanese, the senso-e of mid-Meiji stressed, meant to be ready to die for the nation. Any other approach would not only be cowardly and immoral, but deny one a place in the continuous national history, to say that one was not truly Japanese, or lacked Japanese spirit. Such a formulation would not have been possible without the legacy of the popular print, and its dissemination of a heroic version of national history.

In conclusion, we have seen popular woodblock images of warriors from the Heike Monogatari cross broad ground as they shaped various disseminations of this work to the populace, from playful parodies and aristocratic portraits of a few outstanding Heike figures in the eighteenth century, to serious dramaticizations of a broader variety of Heike characters in the nineteenth, from the use of the print as a means to criticize the tyranny of government in the case of Kiyomori, to the government use of popular warrior prints as a means of instilling "Japanese" values and drumming up domestic support for its foreign wars. What remains clear at the end of this excursion over opposite sides of the map is that there is never simply one work, one Heike Monogatari, that can be objectively spread amongst a people and made into a national epic, but always competing viewpoints, angled representations and politically invested interpretations that make the literary work multiple, and capable of having opposite faces. Never simply entertainment, popular performances and visual representations of the Heike are necessarily weighted disseminations with the power to influence their audiences' perceptions of the past, possibilities in the present and models of action for the future.

Click here for the bibliography