53 Japanese Prints of the Sino-Japanese War

A selection of Japanese war prints depicting the first Sino-Japanese War.

The First Sino-Japanese War, known in China as the Jiawu War 甲午戰爭, began in 1894 and ended in 1895, fought between China’s Qing Empire and the Empire of Japan primarily over influence in Korea.

After more than six months of battles on land and sea and the loss of the Chinese port of Weihaiwei, China sued for peace in February 1895. The war demonstrated the failure of China’s military modernization, and for the first time regional control in East Asia shifted from China to Japan. Approximately 240,000 Japanese fighting men were mobilized for the campaigns in Korea and China, alongside another 154,000 behind-the-lines workers. With its victory over China, Japan entered a new era, emerging as a major power.

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Although the war lasted less than a year, Japanese woodblock artists produced around 3,000 prints depicting the conflict, an average of roughly ten new images per day.

Woodblock printing had been used in China for centuries, primarily for books, before being widely adopted in Japan during the Edo period (1603-1868). In Japan it became closely associated with ukiyo-e, the genre of single-sheet prints that found its audience among the growing population of city dwellers. These prints were inexpensive and were not produced with the intention of being preserved; their purpose was to amuse and entertain.

The war prints of the 1890s served a similar function for a new kind of subject matter. They offer a way to recapture the emotional, popular support that accompanied Japan’s emergence as an assertive, expansionist power at the close of the nineteenth century. Themes of nationalism, militarism, imperialism, and an emerging sense of cultural and even racial identity all found vivid expression in these images. The prints did more than register this mood: they actively contributed to building it. They remain one of the most vivid and accessible sources available for understanding the redefinition of national identity that accompanied Japan’s rise as a major power.

In the West, the “journalistic” role that woodblock prints played in late-19th-century Japan was largely filled by publications that featured engravings and lithographs based on photographs. By the time of the Sino-Japanese War, popular periodicals such as The Illustrated London News also featured photographs themselves. The impression of the world these Western graphics conveyed was, as a rule, both more “realistic” and more detached. They were literally, and often figuratively as well, colorless, a sharp contrast to the vivacious and highly subjective woodblock prints.

Japanese photographers did cover the Sino-Japanese War; an evocative woodblock by Kobayashi Kiyochika even takes them as its subject, standing in the snow and photographing the troops with a large box camera on a tripod.” John W. Dower, Throwing Off Asia II

The roots of the conflict lay in the rivalry between China and Japan over Korea, a kingdom that had long been a tributary state of the Qing Empire. In 1894, the Donghak peasant uprising in Korea prompted the Korean government to request Chinese military assistance; Japan responded by sending its own troops, citing an earlier bilateral agreement. Neither side withdrew once the uprising was suppressed, and tensions escalated into open war by August 1894. Japanese forces secured an early and decisive victory at the Battle of Pyongyang in September, forcing Qing troops to retreat from Korea into Manchuria. Days later, the Beiyang Fleet, China’s modern navy, suffered a crippling defeat at the Battle of the Yalu River. Japanese troops then advanced into Manchuria, capturing the fortified port of Lüshunkou (Port Arthur) in November, before turning south to take Weihaiwei on the Shandong Peninsula in February 1895, eliminating what remained of Chinese naval power. With the approaches to Beijing under Japanese control, the Qing court entered negotiations that concluded with the Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed on April 17, 1895. Under its terms, China recognized Korea’s independence, ceded Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula to Japan, and agreed to a substantial war indemnity. Within days, however, Russia, France, and Germany jointly pressured Japan into returning the Liaodong Peninsula to China, a diplomatic episode known as the Triple Intervention that left lasting resentment in Japan toward the Western powers.

Japanese War prints images

The following contains wartime propaganda images.

Click the image to enlarge

Source: Throwing Off Asia II , Wikipedia

Topic: Japanese war prints, China war prints, sino-japanese war images, old pictures of China, China war, China war images, war art prints

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Matteo Damiani

CHINA-UNDERGROUND. Matteo Damiani is an Italian sinologist, photographer, author and motion designer. Matteo lived and worked for ten years in China. Founder of CinaOggi.it and China-underground.com.

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