[1] The items were exhibited at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, United States, in 1893, where they were described as "the largest examples of cloisonné enamel ever made".

The decoration of the vases represents virtues and the seasons, and also has an allegorical meaning about Japan's role in a changing world and its alliance with the United States.

During Japan's Meiji era (1868 to 1912), the government actively promoted Japanese arts and crafts abroad by exhibiting the best examples in the world's fairs that were held in America and Europe.

[9] Viewing the garniture in Tokyo before its shipping to Chicago, the Anglo-Irish scholar Francis Brinkley predicted that the exposition would not display it in the Palace of Fine Arts because of its political symbolism.

Despite this prediction, it was displayed prominently in the East Court of the Palace as the ethnologist Hubert Howe Bancroft describes in his Book of the Fair.

"[5]The garniture was thus a political statement about how Japan saw its new status in the world, as a land of new beginnings that was emerging as the major regional power, allied with the United States against an encroaching Russia.

The First Sino-Japanese war ended with Japan defeating China and gaining control of the Korean peninsula, preventing Russia's advance into that territory.

[7] In January 2019 it was found to have been the centerpiece of the main dining room of Spenger's Fresh Fish Grotto in Berkeley, California,[11] one of the oldest restaurants in the San Francisco Bay area.