New Year's Day

1790–1801

Tightening censorship: seals on prints

From 1790 prints can be sold only with a censor's seal of approval; over the following decades censorship grows stricter, and violators can receive harsh punishments. From 1799 even preliminary drafts need approval, and in 1801 the works of a group of Utagawa-school offenders, including Toyokuni, are repressed.

1804

Arrest and fifty days in manacles

In 1804 Utamaro is imprisoned over prints of the sixteenth-century ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi, depicted, in the authorities' view, “in an improper form”, and then manacled for fifty days, together with Tsukimaro, Toyokuni, Shuntei, Shun'ei and Jippensha Ikku; their publishers are heavily fined. It is probably the most famous case of censorship of the Edo period, and Utamaro appears to have been the most prominent of those punished.

1804

The prints of Hideyoshi that angered the authorities

The trigger was a wave of prints and books based on the “Ehon Taikōki”, an illustrated life of Hideyoshi (1797–1802): the authorities may have taken offence at historical figures being named and shown with their crests, which was prohibited, and at Hideyoshi being depicted with women of the pleasure quarters. Utamaro's censored prints include the daimyō Katō Kiyomasa lustily gazing at a Korean dancer, Hideyoshi holding the hand of his page Ishida Mitsunari in a sexually suggestive manner, and Hideyoshi with his five consorts viewing cherry blossoms at Daigo-ji temple.

1804–1806

Never recovering from the arrest

The arrest and imprisonment are held to have dealt Utamaro a severe psychological trauma: he could not recover from the shock, and the late period of his work is coloured by tragic tones. Soon after his release the artist died.

31 October 1806

Died