Women Performing Okina, Senzai, and Sanbasō

Utagawa Toyokuni (1769–1825; born in Edo) studied under Utagawa Toyoharu, the founder of the Utagawa school, and became renowned for his actor prints, laying the foundation for the school’s later prosperity. His disciples included Utagawa Kunisada I and Utagawa Kuniyoshi, both of whom would carry the Utagawa style into subsequent generations. From 1794, Toyokuni gained wide recognition with his series Yakusha Butai no Sugata-e (Portraits of Actors on Stage), which depicted kabuki performers with a luminous, transparent quality. The series became immensely popular, surpassing contemporary rivals such as Sharaku and Katsukawa Shun’ei. Toyokuni was also a distinguished painter of beauties, portraying women with a healthy, approachable humanity distinct from the refined elegance of Kitagawa Utamaro. In his later years, he moved away from his earlier style, developing sharper, angular facial features and a distinctive rendering of hunched backs and thick necks, which became characteristic of the Utagawa style. This shift, often associated with the influence of his disciple Kunisada, aligned with the increasing demand for mass-produced prints and the tastes of the growing urban audience, helping secure the continued dominance of the Utagawa school.

This print, dated to around 1801–1804, depicts women performing Okina, Senzai, and Sanbasō. These ritual dances were passed down within sarugaku and, by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had been adopted into kabuki, where they customarily opened the theatrical year and New Year performances. Since women were officially banned from appearing on the kabuki stage at the time, the image has generally been interpreted as a mitate-e—a pictorial conceit or imaginative transposition.

However, from the mid-Edo period onward, historical sources indicate that female performers known as okyōgenshi were invited into the inner quarters of the shogun and powerful daimyō families to present kabuki plays and dances. In 1790, the wife of the kabuki actor Nakamura Nakazō I (1736–1790) is recorded as having set up a performance stage within the Ōoku as an okyōgenshi within the Ōoku. The ranks of these okyōgenshi are also said to have included highly trained figures such as Fujima Mata (?–1867), a member of the Fujima Kanbei choreography lineage, and Bandō Mitsue (1809–1907), a disciple of Bandō Mitsugorō. According to contemporary accounts, these performances could feature elaborate stage sets and costumes on a scale likened to the major licensed theaters of Edo, such as the Nakamura-za and the Ichimura-za.

Taken together — the documentation of these practices, the surviving banzuke (ranking sheets) associated with okyōgenshi and their costumes, as well as multiple ukiyo-e prints depicting women performing fashionable kabuki pieces — this print may be seen as reflecting not only imaginative conceit but also a cultural reality of female-centered performance within elite domestic settings.

[CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ]
Hizô Ukiyo-e taikan/Ukiyo-e Masterpieces in European Collections 11, Museo d'Arte Orientale, Genoa, II (1989), pl. 53

[References]
Kuniyuki Ishii, A History of Fujima Dance, 1984.
Makiko Tsuchida, “Female Actor Nakamura Kasen: Focusing on Her Career in Asakusa Musume Shibai,” 2022.
Special Exhibition: Edo Ōoku, Tokyo National Museum, 2025.