In this battle, the new Meiji forces (combined Satsuma and Chōshū forces) defeated the Shōgitai militia (Tokugawa loyalists) in a massacre at Sannō Shrine, during the May 1868 Battle of Ueno, ending the shogunate in Japan. Saigō Takamori (1827-1877) led the new Meiji forces to Sannō Shrine to meet the Shōgitai militia, under Amano Hachirō (1831-1877). Amano Hachirō is pictured on the far right, conversing with a soldier, away from the heat of battle. Strict prohibitions by the Tokugawa government against depicting contemporary or recent historical events were lifted after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. This print is one of Yoshitoshi's first attempts at realistically depicting a current event. Having directly witnessed the Battle of Ueno, he depicts the cruel realities of the battle field. The initiative he took in realistically depicting violence brought him great attention in the Meiji era.

The Meiji Restoration (1868) ended the Tokugawa shogunate (military bureaucracy) and the reign of the samurai, but the popularity of samurai legend and lore remained. While Meiji administrators began developing a new style of government based on European models, Japanese artists learned techniques of Western art, employing them to a greater or lesser extent. Warriors and the ideals they represented remained a major subject of Japanese prints, especially as Tokugawa censorship laws were lifted and artists were free to chronicle current events. Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892) embraced journalistic veracity; an eyewitness to several major battles, his prints after 1868 are striking in their realism and unflinching depictions of war time. Yoshitoshi and other artists illustrated the last stand of the samurai, a war fought on the southern island of Kyushū, creating bloody and often romantic images of a martial culture in peril. The heroes of these prints were not the imperial Japanese army, who triumphed in the end, but the samurai rebels, who fought fiercely to maintain the power and ideals of their clans.