The publication reflected the social context of Bakumatsu Yokohama and often depicted the frustrations that emerged from conflicts between Japanese domestic politics and early foreign settlement life in Japan.

It is believed that the irregularity of the Punch was due to the state of affairs between 1862 and 1865,[1] in which the government threatened to punish those who published content that defamed or ridiculed others, leading to a brief suspension of the publication.

Clark suggests that Wirgman got married and bought a house during this time and even travelled back to England to settle some loose financial or business ends.

He also expanded the Punch's boundaries from criticising media press and satirising local society to focusing on and revealing the irrationality and issues within port treaty life, critiquing human deficiencies of greed and self-centredness, and domestic politics revolving around the Japanese civil war and the Meiji Restoration.

A major newspaper of the settlement, the Japan Herald, threatened "punishment of no gentle character" towards those who defaced circular documents provoked Wirgman to respond and criticise them through his series of cartoons in the Japan Punch, as depicted in the publication's content in the first year where its pages were filled with attacks and parodies of the editorial style of the settlement's major newspaper and its publisher, Albert Hansard.

[1] Wirgman's distinctive writing style has been characterised as a type of 'deadpan playfulness'[1] to which academic John Clark describes as representative of his 'engaging, eccentric, polyglot' [7] personality.

[8] Otsuka Eiji attributes and outlines the Japan Punch's cartoons as an early form of manga which were independent and consisted of single-framed illustrations that satirised religious leaders, aristocrats and politicians as well as social manners and customs.

The Japan Herald's publisher, Hansard composed an article in the June 7th, 1862 edition of the newspaper, titled ‘The Current Libels’,[1] which would ultimately place restrictions and interfere with the Punch's regularity in publication for a brief period of time.

The article highlighted the Lord Chief Justice's involvement in this issue as it claimed his words: “We have heard it stated, in a quarter likely to be well informed, that H.B.M.’s Charge d’Affaires has expressed his intention to take any steps necessary to suppress that nuisance which has lately existed in the community so offensive to the respectable portion of it and so likely to lead to numerous breaches of the peace.

If a man publishes deliberately and wilfully anything concerning another which renders him ridiculous an action lies against him.”The publication remains as a valuable source of information on the Yokohama region's foreign settlement, politics and social issues of the Meiji era.

He also suggests that the publication had an influence on Kobayashi Kiyochika in the Mamoru Chibun, a Japanese satirical newspaper which featured speech bubbles and wild linguistic and visual puns, similar to those of the Japan Punch.