"Long Live Japan: One Hundred Victories, One Hundred Laughs" — Beware! Beware! Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847–1915) — Woodblock Print, 1894

A figure looms at the centre of the composition — robes billowing, eyes spiralling in panic, mouth open in a wide red cry — while smaller figures gesture and react around him. The title is go-chūshin go-chūshin — "Beware! Beware!" — and the alarm needs no translation.

The cartouche at the top carries the satirical text by Nishimori Takeki, writing as Koppi Dōjin ("Master Skin and Bones") — a column of dense classical Japanese, riddled with wordplay and irony, mocking the Chinese side's military failures in the Yellow Sea. The text references the naval battles of the war: Jiuliancheng, Fengtian, the Yellow Sea fleet. The parodic tone is the point. Where conventional war prints celebrated Japanese heroism, this series chose mockery.

Beware! Beware! belongs to the first part of Kiyochika's landmark series Nihon banzai hyakusen hyakushō — Long Live Japan: One Hundred Victories, One Hundred Laughs — fifty prints published between September 1894 and August 1895 during the Sino-Japanese War. The series title is itself a pun: hyakusen hyakushō sounds identical to the military expression "one hundred battles, one hundred victories."

Kiyochika had studied Western newspaper caricature — particularly the work of British journalist Charles Wirgman — and applied that satirical graphic language directly to the woodblock print format. The result sits at the precise crossroads of two traditions: ukiyo-e technique, Western cartoon sensibility, Meiji-era nationalist fervour.

He is described as "the last important ukiyo-e master and the first noteworthy print artist of modern Japan" — and this series is among the clearest illustrations of why: equal parts visual journalism, political cartoon, and woodblock art.

Series: Nihon banzai hyakusen hyakushō (Long Live Japan: One Hundred Victories, One Hundred Laughs), pl. 26
Date: December 1894
Publisher: Matsuki Heikichi
Format: Ōban woodblock print — 27.8 × 39.7 cm
Held in: British Library (shelfmark 16126.d.2(26)), Japan Center for Asian Historical Records

Museum-quality reproduction printed on thick archival paper. Shipped in a rigid protective tube, ready to frame.