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Paper short abstract

The paper explores how early musha-ehon reshaped the medieval past in seventeenth-century Japan. Focusing on Hishikawa Moronobu’s Musha Sakura (c. 1693), it argues that illustrated books served not only entertainment but also didactic and historical functions.

Paper long abstract

The seventeenth century in Japan witnessed an unprecedented expansion in access to knowledge and cultural production. Social stability and growing demand for information fostered the commercial spread of woodblock printing, giving rise to new forms of printed material. Among the most prominent were kanazōshi, printed booklets that entertained, informed, and/or educated readers. Almost in parallel, the genre of ehon emerged, characterized by a predominance of images accompanied by brief explanatory texts. These illustrated works have often been dismissed as minor forms of entertainment or as utilitarian reference manuals for learning to draw.

This paper challenges such interpretations by examining one of the earliest dated examples of the genre: Musha Sakura (c. 1693), created by the illustrator Hishikawa Moronobu. Commonly classified as a musha-ehon—a compendium of images depicting heroic warriors of the past—Musha Sakura reveals, upon closer analysis, significant affinities with contemporaneous educational kanazōshi. Through a detailed examination of its visual and textual strategies, this study argues that ehon were not merely ancillary or derivative forms, but played an active role in mediating historical knowledge. By foregrounding Musha Sakura as a case study, the paper demonstrates how the highly visual nature of ehon enabled distinctive modes of engagement with the past, contributing to early modern practices of historical understanding, pedagogy, and cultural memory.