Although not as graphically violent as Yoshitoshi's prints of the same subject, Kawanabe Kyōsai's "Battle of Ueno" captures the chaos of battle with similar energy and flair. Action-filled backgrounds upstaged by frenzied soldiers in the foreground lend a sense of confusion and complexity to the battlefield; figures run in all directions, and spent arrows and swords are stuck into the earth at every angle, frustrating any sense of directionality or order. In the center, samurai loyalists run frantically in disarray. One of them, Amano Hachirō, (1831-1868) died during the battle while helping his comrades escape; some of the others, including the general Ikeda Ōsumi, would later commit ritual suicide (seppuku). By placing these tragic figures in a scene of absolute tumult, Kyōsai has crafted a poignant image of a rapidly changing Japan.

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.