A Message from the Director
Mysterious relationship of print and samurai
Samurai in the Edo era, including Ieyasu Tokugawa, has published a large number of prints, as a matter of fact. However, musha-e, ukiyo-e prints of warriors and scenes of battle were popular. The fascinating warrior portraits drawn by Kuniyoshi Utagawa (ukiyo-e artist) were especially magnificent and full of energy. Yet the samurai rendered in musha-e looked very different from the actual samurai who were making prints in the same era. There was an amazing gap between the “printed samurai” and “printing samurai.”
In this exhibition, we will shift from the usual focus of samurai as warriors to samurai as “intellectual” printers. “Print” played an important role in the political shift from a military government to a civilian-controlled government in the early years of the Tokugawa Shogunate.
Please come to see the legacy of printing from the world of the samurai. The articles on exhibit will be replaced with new articles several times to encourage guests to come for repeat visits before the exhibition closes on January 15, 2017. We look forward to welcoming you.
Koichi Kabayama
Director
Printing Museum, Tokyo
Director's Profile
Koichi Kabayama
Director
Printing Museum, Tokyo
Born in Tokyo in 1945. Graduated from the Faculty of Letters at the University of Tokyo in 1965, and after completing the masters degree course at the university became a research assistant at the Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University in 1969. Became an assistant professor at the Faculty of Letters at the University of Tokyo in 1976, and later became a professor. Served as the Director-General of The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo from 2001, becoming Director of the Printing Museum, Tokyo in 2005, a position he still holds. His fields of specialization are Western history and Western cultural history.