Japanese art Japanese art covers a wide range of art styles and media, including ancient pottery, sculpture, ink painting and calligraphy on silk and paper, ''ukiyo-e'' paintings and woodblock prints, ceramics, origami, and more recently manga and anime. It ...

, ''mitate-e'' () is a subgenre of

ukiyo-e Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surfac ...

that employs allusions, puns, and incongruities, often to parody classical art or events. The term derives from two roots: ''mitateru'' (, "to liken one thing to another") and ''e'' (, "picture"). The ''mitate'' technique arose first in poetry and became prominent during the

Heian period The is the last division of classical Japanese history, running from 794 to 1185. It followed the Nara period, beginning when the 50th emperor, Emperor Kanmu, moved the capital of Japan to Heian-kyō (modern Kyoto). means "peace" in Japanese. ...

(794–1185).

Haiku is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a ''kigo'', or se ...

poets revived the technique during the

Edo period The or is the period between 1603 and 1867 in the history of Japan, when Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and the country's 300 regional '' daimyo''. Emerging from the chaos of the Sengoku period, the Edo period was characteriz ...

(1603–1868), from which it spread to the other arts of the era. Such works typically employ allusions, puns, and incongruities, and frequently recall classical artworks. In the context of ukiyo-e, ''mitate-e'' is often translated into English as "parody picture". This usage of the term arose much later; the term itself was used in different ways during the Edo period. Those works today called ''mitate-e'' used different labels at the time, such as ''fūryū'' (, "elegant" or "fashionable") which appeared frequently in the 18th century on works by

Okumura Masanobu Okumura Masanobu ( ja, 奥村政信; 1686 – 13 March 1764) was a Japanese print designer, book publisher, and painter. He also illustrated novelettes and in his early years wrote some fiction. At first his work adhered to the Torii ...

(1686–1764) and

Suzuki Harunobu Suzuki Harunobu ( ja, 鈴木春信; ) was a Japanese designer of woodblock print art in the style. He was an innovator, the first to produce full-color prints () in 1765, rendering obsolete the former modes of two- and three-color prints. Haru ...

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