Meiji satirical print

Kobayashi Kiyochika was trained in the ukiyo-e woodblock tradition, and his work shows how the comic and satirical spirit passed from the old print culture into the Meiji era. Best known for atmospheric "light-ray" landscapes of a modernizing Tokyo, he also produced sharp satirical prints and, during the wars of the 1890s, widely circulated war imagery.

His satirical sheets carried the ponchi impulse — mockery, exaggeration, topical bite — within the venerable medium of the woodblock print, showing that the new cartoon energy and the inherited brush-and-block tradition were not separate worlds but one continuous line. Kiyochika stands here for the native print heritage that met the imported cartoon and helped give modern manga its distinctly Japanese roots.