Image: Key visual for the summer special exhibition 'Bugei: Samurai Athletes', 25 July to 27 September 2026, incorporating the mounted archer from Yoshu Chikanobu's 'Chiyoda no On-omote: Yabusame Joran', 1897. Courtesy of the Tokugawa Art Museum, Nagoya
The Tokugawa Art Museum's post points to a work shown in its summer special exhibition 'Bugei: Samurai Athletes', which runs from 25 July to 27 September 2026 in Nagoya. The museum identifies the rider beside the black-hatted horse standard as Oda Nobunaga and the rider beneath the gold-ground sun-disc fan as Tokugawa Ieyasu, and invites visitors to find Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the gallery for themselves.
The museum's exhibition page lists among the main exhibits a six-panel folding screen depicting the Battle of Nagashino, Edo period, eighteenth to nineteenth century, on view only in the first half of the run, from 25 July to 25 August 2026. From 26 August to 27 September it is replaced by the left screen of a pair of six-panel screens of horse training, Edo period, seventeenth century, a gift of the Okaya family. Other listed exhibits include prints of equestrian archery and martial displays from Yoshu Chikanobu's 'Chiyoda no On-omote' series of 1897, a gilt quiver of the Momoyama to Edo periods used by Asaoka Heibei Shigemasa, a black-lacquered saddle and stirrups with paulownia crests used by Tokugawa Ieyasu, and a long tachi signed Naganori, Muromachi period, fourteenth century, with its red-lacquered mounting, owned by the first head of the Owari Yagyu line.
The exhibition draws on arms, armour and instructional manuals handed down in the Owari Tokugawa house to trace martial disciplines such as archery, horsemanship, swordsmanship and the spear, from Edo-period training for battle to their persistence after the abolition of the samurai class as sport and as physical and mental discipline in the military and in schools. It is organised by the Tokugawa Art Museum with the Nagoya City Hosa Library, the Chunichi Shimbun, Nikkei and NHK Nagoya.
The post's drama reference is to NHK's 2026 taiga series 'Toyotomi Kyodai!'. The museum's tie-in special exhibition of the same name has already closed, having run from 18 April to 14 June 2026 with about 140 works of art and historical documents, and having also examined Hideyoshi and his brother Hidenaga's relations with figures including Nobunaga, Ieyasu, Todo Takatora and Sen no Rikyu. A related catalogue of arms and armour in the museum's collection, containing 323 works including some fifty newly added hawking implements, was published on 24 July 2026 at 3,000 yen, and a Saturday lecture on Edo-period martial artists by a senior curator took place on 8 August 2026, with advance places fully booked.
The museum is open from 10 am to 5 pm, with last admission at 4.30 pm, and closes on Mondays; it will open on Monday 21 September, a public holiday, and close on 24 September instead. Admission is 2,000 yen for adults and 1,200 yen for high-school and university students, and free for elementary and junior-high-school pupils following the museum's revision of its admission charges.
