The splendid new exhibition at the Royal Academy of 19th-century woodblock prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi is dominated by scenes of heroic samurai warriors, fighting to the death, teeth bared and eyes bulging as they grapple with tigers and strange monsters or fend off the flying arrows or slashing swords of their enemies. The show is so ferociously vigorous that you feel, as you leave, like grabbing a sword and slashing your way through the crowds of Piccadilly.

It is not surprising that Kuniyoshi specialised in warrior prints. For most of the 19th century, Japan was governed by the Tokugawa shogunate. It had been established by force, and it was underpinned by force and preserved by force, both actual and implicit. Controlling a vast proportion of the nation’s wealth, the Tokugawa government called on the service of some 300,000 samurai who staffed both a standing army and the bureaucracy, giving Tokugawa society an unavoidably martial quality.

Censorship was pervasive, suppressing popular culture, keeping a lid on the growth of the merchant classes and encouraging frugality, while harking back to the spirit of an earlier, purer martial age.

Kuniyoshi was an irreverent free spirit and became an inspired rule-breaker. The ban on depicting the ruling classes, their ancestors or any contemporary events with political ramifications merely encouraged his inventiveness and he managed not just to escape the censors but to throw their efforts back in their faces.

He was a prolific artist, making some 10,000 works in his lifetime, the most popular of which sold 8,000 impressions, each at the price of a double helping of noodles. Not only did he depict warriors and their skirmishes but also landscapes and portraits of beautiful women as well as erotic images and visual jokes. In one print of a brothel, he substitutes sparrows dressed in kimonos for the prostitutes and their clients. In another, a warrior hero dozes on his sickbed, taunted in his dreams by demons flying above his head, while his guards play boardgames. Contemporary society read into the images what they wanted to see, in this case the ineffectual Tokugawa shogun and his bureaucrats, while the demons represented the various professions suppressed by the censors.

Graphically, many of these prints are sensational. In one the warrior monk Benkei fights an opponent on Gojo Bridge in Kyoto. The curved bridge sweeps across the entire triptych, leading the eye past the spear-wielding Benkei and his rival and on to the far shore of the city where Higashiyama mountain is seen through a grid formed by the wooden stilts of the bridge. Below is the gorgeous deep Prussian blue of the water, and above, a group of geese and bats, looking like delicate calligraphic characters, flit across the pale blue sky in front of the full moon. Very varied, high spirited and riotously energetic, this show is a treat.

March 21 to June 7 (www.royalacademy.org.uk)

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