Rediscovering The Old Tokaido

For the first time in an English language edition published outside Japan, all 55 prints of Hiroshige's 'Fifty-three Stages of the Tokaido' are reproduced in full colour. Remarkably, the Old Tokaido can still be found in many locations and photographs of the modern parallel the old.

Hokusais 53 Stations of the Tokaido 1801 is something completely different. It is his first. And it is one of the first at all. It is different from his famous 36 Views of Mt Fuji, which are sublime artistic expressions distilling a long lifes work. It is different from much of Hokusais other well known work, like his 100 Views of Mt Fuji. But in that series Hokusai still retained a lot of the humor and the caricature found here. It is different from the many other well known 53 Stations of the Tokaido in that Hokusai does not focus on the landscape and the markers that Hiroshige and others showed. Instead Hokusai focus on the events, the interactions between the travellers, the tales that you will share with your friends when you get back home. It was a great and earlier contribution to the Tokaido literature.

All the way through Hiroshige follows certain design principles of proportion of elements, arranging elements and views by diagonals and parallels and balancing of color elements. Compared to most of his other Tokaido series Hiroshige in Aritaya focus on letting the landscape tell the story instead of letting people or legend do that, although this is not followed through completely.

This series, Fifty-three Pairings of the Tokaido Road, Tokaido gojusan tsui, popularly called Pairs Tokaido or 53 Parallels for the Tokaido Road, was published in 1845-1846. It is a unique cooperation between three artists: Utagawa Hiroshige, Utagawa Kunisada and Utagawa Kuniyoshi and five publishers: Ibaya Kyubei, (Ibaya Senzaburo (Dansendo)) and Kojimaya Jubei, Enshuya Matabei, Ebiya Rinnosuke (Kaijudo) and Iseya Ichibei. The special feature of this Pairs Tokaido is the pairing of a print for each station with a legend, a wonderful, dramatic, historic or supranatural story. These stories are told partly by the print theme, partly by accompanying text in a cartouche. Sometimes there is a poem. It is a very enjoyable tour!

This was the most popular print series ever made in Japan. It was even more popular series ever made in Japan. It was even more popular than the Hokusai series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which had been recently published and which had influenced Hiroshige tremendously (ISBN 9783756844104). There were 53 post stations along this important road, apart from the start and terminus, in all 55 prints, which are all here in the order from Edo to Kyoto, as in the Hoeido edition (1833-34).

Vincent Van Gogh (1853 – 1890) is often mentioned as one of the best examples of Japonism, Western art inspired by Japanese art. Van Gogh was infatuated with a vision of Japanese art. He experienced this mainly from Japanese woodblock prints which became widely available after Commodore Matthew Perry forced Japan to open with the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854 after abt 250 years of seclusion. Van Gogh and his brother Theo dealt in these prints for a while and Van Gogh´s studio was literally plastered with them. Van Gogh vision of Japan was a mythical fantasy, an ideal for the artist, and he even tried to establish an artist´s colony to live out this dream. Japan, on the other hand, and especially the woodblock print artists, were inspired by earlier Dutch engraved prints, which had a profound influence on artists like Katsushika Hokusai from abt 1800. It was from these prints Western perspective entered into Japanese art. In the period from abt 1800 to 1850 Japanese prints evolved with Hokusai´s 36 Views of Mt Fuji and became the inspiration that met painters like van Gogh. In a way, what these Western artists saw, was a Japanese mirror of their own processed artistic tradition.

This book examines key themes of Kyushu’s history from earliest times – the cultural interaction with the continental mainland, settlement, location and infrastructure as well as trade and commerce – arguing that it was the principal stepping-stone in terms of Japan’s cultural, social and economic advance through history up to the present day.