Picture of a Night Battle at Shijō in Kyoto

From the Minneapolis Institute of Art record

During the Edo period, the shogunate had a strict ban on depicting warriors from the Warring States period, right before it had established power. So, in some prints, Yoshitoshi replaced the names of famous historical figures with pseudonyms. Here, the main character of the print (standing at far right) is named in the red cartouche as “Ōta Kazusanosuke Taira Harunaga kō”; his real name was Oda Nobunaga, the first of three “Great Unifiers” of Japan. Though titled as an unspecified night battle set in Kyoto, the print shows the Honnō-ji Incident, an attempted assasination against Nobunaga that ultimately resulted in his suicide. Asia