Abstract
In 1874–1875, hundreds of colorful nishiki-e (woodblock prints) pictorialized individual articles previously published in Tokyo’s main daily newspapers. Because many prints foregrounded violent, sexual, and supernatural themes, they have been viewed as “hybrid” Edo-Meiji media forms that demonstrate an imperfect understanding of what constituted the news. In the context of 1870s’ urban culture, however, news nishiki-e were part of a broader category of “old media”—including theater, short illustrated fiction, and oral storytelling—that self-consciously incorporated the newly prominent term shinbun (news or newspaper). These prints exploited the indeterminacy of images and the possibilities of text-image interplay to draw out social tensions and encourage audiences to reflect critically on changes wrought by the Restoration. Because the choice of what to think always remained with the reader-viewer, the disappearance of news nishiki-e thus constituted the loss of a mode of criticality.
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