Naniwa Shinbun (News from Naniwa)

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Naniwa Shinbun ["News from Naniwa"]

[Creator unidentified].

[Japan: printing house unidentified, ca. early Meiji period (1860-80s)?].

A double-sided woodblock used to print a twenty-verse hitotsutose counting song. Hitotsutose was a type of kazoe-uta counting poem popular from the Meiji to early Shōwa period. Hitotsutose sheets printed by woodblocks such as this one show elements of both kazoe-uta booklets and banzuke; they could easily be folded into booklets and bound, displayed as-is, or rolled into scrolls. This woodblock was used for printing two separate sheets, the jō (first issue) and ge (last issue), each of which contained ten verses. Both sheets would have had illustrated titles featuring a man and dog (the man is being bitten by the dog in the ge title illustration). The work that was printed using the woodblock seems to be unrelated to the movable type-printed Naniwa Shinbun newspaper published in Osaka in the early Meiji period (Naniwa is, of course, one of the names for Osaka and its surroundings). A nice example of a Meiji era woodblock cut for an ephemeral genre, perfect for teaching purposes. 

One woodblock, text and illustrations cut on both sides. Metal eyelets affixed to extremities, hanging string looped through eyelets. Approximately 1.5 x 1.5 cm loss to text cut for twentieth song. 12.8 x 38.3 cm.

Naniwa Shinbun (News from Naniwa)
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