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Eisen Tomioka was born in Nagano prefecture with the given name of Hidetaro. He went to Tokyo with the intention of becoming a full-time artist. But first he took a post as a civilian employee with the Japanese army to make a living.<br/><br/>Later he resigned from this post to study art with Kobayashi Eitaku. He worked as an illustrator. During the late Meiji period publishers of newspapers, journals and book used to sell their products with supplements of woodblock prints. These prints are called kuchi-e and were created using the traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking techniques.<br/><br/>Eisen Tomioka died at a young age of 41 years, when he was about to fulfill his great dream: becoming what he considered to be a 'real' artist - a recognised painter.
Samurai is the term for the military nobility of pre-industrial Japan. By the end of the 12th century, samurai became almost entirely synonymous with bushi, and the word was closely associated with the middle and upper echelons of the warrior class.<br/><br/> The samurai followed a set of rules that came to be known as Bushidō. While they numbered less than ten percent of Japan's population, samurai teachings can still be found today in both everyday life and in martial arts such as Kendō, meaning the way of the sword.
A ninja (忍者) or shinobi (忍び) was a covert agent or mercenary in feudal Japan who specialized in unorthodox warfare. The functions of the ninja included espionage, sabotage, infiltration, and assassination, and open combat in certain situations.<br/><br/> Their covert methods of waging war contrasted the ninja with the samurai, who observed strict rules about honor and combat. The shinobi proper, a specially trained group of spies and mercenaries, appeared in the Sengoku or 'warring states' period, in the 15th century, but antecedents may have existed in the 14th century, and possibly even in the 12th century (Heian or early Kamakura era).