Maggs Bros. Ltd.

At Tokyo station, a large crowd waits on the platform for a bullet train. In just over two hours they will arrive in the ancient capital of Kyoto, over 300 km away. The same will happen in ten minutes’ time, when the next train arrives. For the passengers seated on the much-coveted right-hand side of the carriage, they will have a glorious view of Mount Fuji. This is the Tōkaidō of today: a high- speed bullet train that zips between Kyoto and Tokyo, making only a small number of stops along the way. It is named after the historical Tōkaidō, ‘Eastern Sea Road’, which was one of the five main roads (gokaido) developed in the early Edo period (1603–1868) that originated from the capital city of Edo (now Tokyo) to its surrounding provinces.

When the ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) created his famous print series, The 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō in 1834, it was a far more arduous journey. The winding route was over 500km in total, and many travellers would have done this journey on foot. Hiroshige himself walked the entirety of the Tōkaidō, among a delegation of Edo officials who were sent to deliver a gift of live horses from the Tokugawa shogun to the emperor.

Hiroshige was born into a prestigious samurai family and served as a fire department official assigned to Edo Castle, protecting arguably the most important building in the capital city. Preferring to pursue art, he passed his title down to his son, and formally adopted the artist name Ando Hiroshige in 1812.(1) In a fantastic article about Princeton University’s collection of Toōaidō materials, curator Nicole Fabricand-Person writes, ‘Why he was included in the entourage is unknown, but it appears he was sent to make a visual record of the ceremonies and other aspects of the trip’.(2) Thus began Hiroshige’s documentation of the Tōkaidō, in the company of samurai peers and valuable horses.

On his journey, Hiroshige would have encountered many types of people. Since the Tōkaidō connected the two most important cities – the ancient capital of Kyoto and the modern capital of Edo – it played host to all echelons of society, from high-ranking samurai to low-ranking merchants.(3) In his book on the history of Japan, diplomat and scholar George Sansom describes the heyday of these roads:

... [the gokaidō] now thronged with the retinues of daimyo passing to and from their fiefs, officials and messengers travelling to Osaka, Kyoto or other places under bakufu control, and a heterogenous crowd of merchants, pedlars, pilgrims, players and other itinerants. (4) Strung out along these main roads was a succession of townships, composed chiefly of shops and inns, eating houses and less seemly establishments to meet the needs of travellers, scenes of bustling many-coloured life which was later to be recorded by Hokusai and Hiroshige. (5)

Considering the large number of people, packhorses and palanquins moving along the Tōkaidō, at points the clamour would have been tremendous. As Sansom mentions, the main highways were not just travelled by merchants and pedlars on pilgrimages, but by samurai and their entourages, forming a true social melting pot.

The ‘53 Stations’ refers to the shukuba, which were Government-designated resting stops on the Tōkaidō. There were inns at each shukuba – some more refined, others much cheaper for commoners – as well as shops and eateries serving local delicacies. Although Hiroshige’s series centred around the 53 official shukuba, it depicted 55 scenes in total. It is bookended by two famous bridges; in the first print we leave Edo via Nihonbashi, and in the last print we enter Kyoto over the Sanjo O ̄hachi. Both remain important landmarks today.

The Tōkaidō was not simply a practical route between two cities, but a journey through Japan’s dramatic landscapes with busy, strategic stops that offered entertainment and commerce. This is wonderfully captured in the Tōkaidō meisho-zue, a guidebook to the Tōkaidō in six volumes, which was first published in 1797 by Kobayashi Shinbe. The book is laden with highly detailed woodblock-printed illustrations. While some depict panoramic views of the countryside, others show close-ups of busy street scenes. Such is the intricacy of the meisho-zue that they continue to be invaluable resources for researchers of early modern Japan.

Readers of the sixth volume of the Tōkaidō meisho-zue, will note that it shows Izumiya and its neighbouring shop Masuya, both publishers and booksellers who produced a vast number of prints and publications (vol. 6, ff. 73r–74v). Looking closer, one can identify individual prints of famous landscapes and kabuki actors. Outside the shops, wandering bibliophiles stop to peer inside...

The meisho-zue undoubtedly influenced Hiroshige, as did a number of literary and illustrated books published on the theme of the famous highroads. However, it was Hiroshige’s sensational series that proved to be the most enduring representation of the Tōkaidō. Indeed, owing to the success of the first series, Hiroshige continued to make over twenty variations.(6) While some show different activities taking place at each station, in others Hiroshige changed the composition entirely. Dansendō published the harimaze edition of the Tōkaidō, wherein each print was designed vertically and featured a cluster of three to six vignettes of poetry, local craft and delicacies, as well as elements of scenery.(7) Around the same time, Shōrindō published a version in which each station was represented by a different local beauty.(8) Hiroshige was the master of iteration. Not only did he popularise the Tōkaidō, but he demonstrated its immense depth and visual potential in print.

Hiroshige’s contemporaries also made variations on the 53 Stations. Perhaps the most unusual is the Myōkaikō Gojusantsugi [The Cat Lover’s 53 Stations] by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798–1861); an ukiyo-e triptych featuring over 55 cats, each representing a station on the Tōkaidō. With its pale pink background, it is extremely charming and curious. The cats are also far more layered than they may initially seem; for the Nihonbashi station a cat is shown eating two sticks of dried bonito fish, which is an ingenious play on words – dried bonito is used in dashi (stock), and so by playing with two, pluralised to nihon, the cat is depicted with nihon-dashi, ‘two sticks for dashi’, a pun on ‘Nihon-bashi’. Each cat follows a similar wordplay and demonstrates how the Tōkaidō can be interpreted in more playful ways.

One year after the manga scrolls, another collaborative set of Tōkaidō scrolls was made, this time by artists Iguchi Kashu (1880–1930) and Ōtani Son’yu (1886–1939). Iguchi was a multi award-winning painter who was trained in the Shijo school of Nihonga and taught Ōtani, who was a Buddhist monk at the Nishi-honganji temple in Kyoto. Ōtani had a particularly varied life; he had been sent as a military monk to China during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), and later to Korea to work on the development of regional temples. By the time he embarked on the Tōkaidō journey with his painting teacher in 1919, Ōtani had already travelled extensively abroad.

Much in the spirit of Hiroshige’s journey, the pair took ample paper and drawing materials, making detailed sketches at every station. The main difference to Hiroshige was that they did the journey in reverse, starting from Kyoto and ending in Tokyo, and they were not delivering live, expensive horses. The resulting series, Tōkaidō goju ̄san-tsugi emaki [Handscrolls of the 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō] depicts the 53 stations in their traditional order, from Nihonbashi (Tokyo/Edo) to Sanjo ̄hashi (Kyoto). Scenes of the stations alternate between Iguchi and Ōtani’s sketches, forming a beautiful and seam- less collaboration between two great artists.

No expense was spared in the production of these scrolls. The drawings, with a combined length of over 50m, were split across eight scrolls, entirely printed on silver-specked handmade paper. The gold-leaf title slips were each written in manuscript and pasted onto the outer layer of every scroll, which was made from Nishijin-woven, light blue and gold brocade-woven silk (of luxury kimono standard), fastened with purple silk ties. Custom cases were also made to house the eight scrolls: a two-level black lacquerware box (much like a traditional New Year’s bento box), with hand-painted gold detailing along the edges and a manuscript title on the upper lid in bright, fluid gold (fig. 2). This came with a protective indigo-dyed furoshiki cotton cloth, so that it could be easily lowered into its naturally wood-scented paulownia box, which had woven silk ties for ease of lifting (fig. 3). The unboxing of these scrolls alone creates a great sense of ceremony.

The most impressive part of the scrolls, however, was the printing. To reproduce the painterly quality of Iguchi and Ōtani’s observations, black and white photographs were taken of each sketch. These were then reproduced in collotype – a laborious photographic printing method that was increasingly popular in Japan from the late 19^th century – to produce the greyscale underlayer (shita-e) of each scene. The colour elements were then layered on top by hand using traditional Japanese woodblock printing technology, similar to Hiroshige’s ukiyo-e series. Finally, gold-pigmented details were printed to give some additional depth. To employ collotype print- ing and multiple layers of colour and gold woodblock for over 50m of printed imagery is an extraordinary feat.

The Kyoto publisher, Nakamura Taikan, produced the scrolls for private customers and priced the sets at ¥500 each, which was staggeringly expensive in 1922. Though it is not clear how many of these sets were made, we can be certain that the first edition was the only edition. Indeed, the scrolls were so costly to produce that they bankrupted the publisher. This was in part due to the expense of printing the collotype underlayer (shita-e), which was outsourced to Motohashi Sadajiro in Tokyo. The bankrupting of a publisher is surely an accolade that few books achieve, though I am sure readers of this journal will be able to name more examples.