Stirring up trouble as lawless, anti-social, and anti-authoritarian elements of society, outlaws have continued to be excluded from official history and other academic disciplines. Therefore, making them the focus of historical research has been fraught with much difficulty.

However, there was once an unofficial history of the common folk. It competed with official history and the protagonists that filled this history were outlaws such as gamblers, chivalrous men, masterless samurai, itinerant priests, and entertainers. Of all the periods of Japanese history, it was at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate and beginning of the Meiji Restoration that the roles played by these legendary heroes reached their peak. They were written about in books, depicted in colored woodblock prints, portrayed in Kabuki, and appeared in stories and narrative ballads, becoming popular heroes deeply ingrained in the people's consciousness.

This Special Exhibition aims to retell history, starting with these gamblers and chivalrous men who appear in legends. In particular, through their activities, we attempt to sift through the history of the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate and beginning of the Meiji Restoration. Making use of the methods of written history, we draw closer to the outlaws that appeared in Kabuki and stories by gradually peeling away the firmly encrusted layers of fact and fiction.

In the first part of the exhibition, called "Backgrounds of the Outlaw", we pursue the ideological roots that gave rise to outlaws while focusing on the "Shi Ji" (one of the first official histories of China) and the "Shuihu Zhuan" ("Suikoden", a Chinese novel translated as "Outlaws of the Marsh"). From the prosperity of silk production, highway stations, ports, and landings of riverbank, we capture the foundations of society in which outlaws lived.

In the second part, called "A Group of Outlaws", we move away from the fiction as we close in on the facts about outlaws who were turned into heroes, such as Kunisada Chuji and Shimizu no Jirocho, and the figures who appear in the "Tempo Suikoden". We also examine the Meiji Restoration, a period when outlaws burst onto the pages of official history, from the perspective of the gamblers who were eradicated.

In the third part, called "Invented Heroes in the Media", we study how outlaws were made into heroes through a wide range of media, including stories, narrative ballads, plays, and movies.