SHIORI’S RESEARCH JOURNAL 013
I opened a sumo print to look at the yokozuna, then noticed the columns behind him. Red-and-white bands in one print, different colours in another. Both are dated 1884.
After getting home from work and having dinner, I was looking through some sumo prints on my tablet. In the one I’d opened, a yokozuna filled much of the picture. I’d been looking at his pose and his feet, but something else had started to catch my eye.
The columns. Red and white.
And the red and white ran in diagonal bands. As I followed them up one of the thick columns, I noticed similar bands beyond the yokozuna. Oh, there too.
Once I’d noticed them, my eyes kept going back, even when I zoomed out. That red and white really does stand out.
The print is Ogata Gekkō’s Yokozuna in the Sumo Bout at Enryokan Watched by the Emperor, in the Edo-Tokyo Museum’s digital archive. Its creation-date entry says March 1884.
I opened another sumo print from the same year: A Ring Entering Ceremony at a Charity Sumo Tournament, by Utagawa Kuniaki II. That one is dated February.
Oh. These are different from one another.
In the public image, the upper sections of the columns supporting the roof look whitish, red, blue-green and dark, from left to right. There’s so much colour in the figures and the audience, too, but I’m following the columns one by one.
Going back and forth between the two images, I realized I’d mostly been looking at the upper sections. What about farther down?
In Kuniaki’s print, the columns that look whitish and blue-green at the top look red lower down. Gekkō’s red-and-white bands don’t continue all the way down, either. Below them, the columns look red.
So there’s something they share, too. Back up again.
If you’d like, try following a column from top to bottom in the museum’s images. I kept getting distracted by the colours at the top and going back before I’d reached the lower part.
Why red and white, I wonder? I like how lively it looks. But comparing these two pictures doesn’t tell me the reason. The dates belong to the prints, too; they aren’t confirmed dates for the events depicted.
I took my hands away from the tablet and got out a red coloured pencil. Holding the edge of the page, I added a few short diagonal strokes. I wasn’t trying to copy the shape of the columns, just the red-and-white pattern that had caught my eye.
I left the white parts as bare paper and filled in two red bands, then a third. Yes, something like that.
Beside them, I wrote a small note: “Gekkō, March 1884.” It was only a quick sketch, but that little patch of the page looked bright.
I put the pencil down and looked back at the tablet. Yokozuna, columns, back to the yokozuna. Tonight, my eyes keep going back to the columns.
The two works and their sources
- Yokozuna in the Sumo Bout at Enryokan Watched by the Emperor
Ogata Gekkō · 1884-03 · Edo-Tokyo Museum
ID 94200173-94200175 - A Ring Entering Ceremony at a Charity Sumo Tournament
Utagawa Kuniaki II · 1884-02 · Edo-Tokyo Museum
ID 94200149-94200151
Titles, artists and creation dates were checked against the Edo-Tokyo Museum’s collection records. The colour descriptions concern what is visible in its public digital images. These two works do not establish the dates of the events depicted, the exact historical colours or materials, or the meaning of the red and white. The colour comparison is an editorial schematic, not a reproduction of either print or a historical reconstruction.
Shiori is a character created for this publication. Her everyday scenes and the illustrations are fictional; the information about the sumo prints has been checked against the collection records cited here.