Caricatures on Japanese woodblock prints from 1842 to 1905

Establishing a database of caricatures on Japanese woodblock-prints issued between 1842 and 1905 The Tenpo-reforms in the 1840s near the end of the Japanese seclusion period imposed various restrictions and prohibitions on the ukiyo-e world. The reforms had a lasting effect on woodblock prints. The main themes on the prints up to the reforms, courtesans and actors, lost popularity, and caricatures of all kinds, from political caricatures to harmless drawings of no deeper meaning, became a new genre called giga or humorous pictures. Caricatures remained popular until the end of the Edo period, and the new developments of the Meiji period as well as the authoritarian Meiji government became a popular object of caricatures, too. This genre has remained outside the major scope of ukiyo-e research, the main reason for which seems to be its difficult accessibility: many pictures contain texts difficult to read, and the texts as well as the pictures are so encoded, that they are difficult to understand. Furthermore, traditional ukiyo-e research understandably selected their research objects by aesthetic criteria, which automatically foreclosed any understanding for these pictures. Only during the last two decades caricatures increasingly were seen worthy for research, and there exists research on sub genres like earthquake-pictures, measles-pictures, Yokohama-pictures or ken-pictures, as well as research on particular artists like Kuniyoshi, Kyosai or Kiyochika. This project aims at establishing a database of app. 1500 caricatures on woodblock prints, which were commercially published between 1842 and 1905. It is intended to put the database into the internet and let the international community of researchers participate in the results of this project. It will be tried to find out whether the caricatures can be interpreted to represent a changed political consciousness of the town`s people of Edo. Finally attention will be given to the equally neglected caricatures from the Sino- and the Russo-Japanese War, and to how they contributed to create xenophobic attitudes among the Japanese people.