"If I saw this screen in 17th-century Japan, " he says, "I'd see it as a statement of resistance against the Shogunate, " the feudal military leaders who were eroding the power of the emperor.
In 1868, samurai from the two remote southern domains of Satsuma and Choshu seized the imperial palace in Kyoto, declared the restoration of the Meiji emperor and brought to a sudden end two-and-a-half centuries of rule by the Tokugawa shogunate.