Following Japan’s Most Famous Highway Through the Woodblock Prints of Hokusai, Hiroshige and Kunisada ~ Article 4
A Road Across Japan
A road is normally something we travel along rather than something we look at, but Japan’s historic Tōkaidō became both. During the Edo period, this great highway connected Edo, the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate, with Kyoto, the imperial capital. Stretching along Japan’s eastern seaboard, it passed through towns and villages, crossed rivers, climbed mountain approaches and carried travelers through continuously changing landscapes.
Between these two major cities stood fifty-three official post stations (shukuba), where travelers could find essential services such as lodging, food, fresh horses, and porters for the next stage of their journey. While these stations provided physical structure for travelers, they offered Japanese printmakers something even more valuable: a ready-made itinerary to capture the beauty of Japan. A series based upon the Tōkaidō did not have to invent its itinerary. The road already provided one. Station followed station. The journey became a series.
Fifty-Three Stations, Fifty-Three Destinations
The term “Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō” can be slightly misleading to a modern reader. These were not railway stations. They were settlements positioned along a road traveled on foot, horseback and by palanquin. Each formed part of the infrastructure that made long-distance movement possible.
Distances between stations varied. So did the difficulties encountered along the way. Rivers could delay travelers. Weather could alter progress. Mountainous stretches demanded greater effort. Inns and teahouses provided rest, while porters and horses moved people and baggage between designated points.
That rhythm—departure, road, arrival, rest and departure again—gave the Tōkaidō its identity. It also made the route ideally suited to serial imagery.
A purchaser did not need to see every print at once to understand the concept. Each new design represented another stop on a journey whose direction was already familiar.
The road connected the individual sheets.
CHB-94 – “Ejiri”. Artist Katsushika Hokusai
Why Travel Became an Image
Not everyone who enjoyed a picture of the Tōkaidō had traveled its entire length. That was part of its appeal.
Travel in Tokugawa Japan was regulated, but movement along the country’s roads was extensive. Officials, daimyō processions, merchants, pilgrims, servants and other travelers all contributed to the traffic of the highways. Religious pilgrimage in particular could place ordinary people on journeys far beyond their usual surroundings.
At the same time, famous places acquired identities through guidebooks, literature, stories and pictures. The result was a powerful combination: the recognizable place and the imagined journey.
A Tōkaidō print could remind one purchaser of somewhere already visited. For another, it could picture a destination known only by reputation. For someone contemplating a journey, the succession of stations could make distant geography feel comprehensible.
This is one reason travel imagery became so compelling. The print could move even when its owner did not.
CHB-95 – Katsushika Hokusai
Hokusai Before the Great Wave
The Hokusai represented by Bai Win’s Tōkaidō prints may surprise viewers who know him principally through The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
These road scenes belong to an earlier phase of his engagement with landscape and travel. Here the famous place is often inseparable from what is happening within it.
At Kanbara, Ejiri, Akasaka, Chiryū, Fujikawa and Okitsu, the station is not simply a scenic backdrop. Roads have purposes. Buildings are used. Travelers pause or continue. People carry things, meet one another and negotiate the practical business of getting from one place to the next.
The scale of the prints encourages close looking. Rather than presenting the Tōkaidō as a succession of grand panoramas, these images can feel almost episodic: small observations encountered along a much longer road.
Seen together, Bai Win’s six Hokusai station prints begin to recover something an isolated sheet cannot provide. They restore the idea of progression. One place leads to another.
CHB-98 – “Chiryû”. Artist Katsushika Hokusai.
Left to Right: 1. Chiryū (池鯉鮒) Station No. 39 . CHB-97. 2. Fujikawa (藤川) Station No. 37 HB-101A. 3. Akasaka (赤坂) Station No. 95 CHB 95. 4. Ejiri (江尻) Station No. 18 CHB-94. 5. Okitsu (興津) Station No. 17 CHB-101B. 6. Kanbara (蒲原) Station No. 15 CHB-98
The Same Road Could Become a Different Picture
There was no single correct way to picture the Tōkaidō. That becomes especially apparent when we move from Hokusai to Utagawa Hiroshige.
Hiroshige’s enormously successful Tōkaidō designs helped establish the road as one of the defining subjects of nineteenth-century Japanese landscape printmaking. Yet the importance of these works lies not in their functioning as straightforward topographical records.
A station could be characterized by weather. A river crossing could become the principal event. A distant mountain could dominate the horizon. Travelers might occupy the foreground—or almost disappear into their surroundings.
The station name remained constant. The artistic decision did not. That distinction is fundamental to understanding Tōkaidō imagery. The series format imposed geography, but it did not impose vision.
Two artists could arrive at the same station and produce two entirely different experiences of being there.
When the Road Became a Stage
Landscape was only one way of using the famous highway. The Bai Win print associated with Shirai Gonpachi demonstrates how flexible the idea of the Tōkaidō could become. Here the emphasis shifts from the place to the figure.
Gonpachi belonged to the world of popular narrative and theatre, a character whose story was already familiar to many nineteenth-century viewers. By bringing such figures into Tōkaidō imagery, artists could combine two successful forms of popular culture: the famous road and the famous character. The result complicates our modern expectation of what a “travel print” should look like.
A Tōkaidō series did not necessarily have to be an album of empty landscapes. The route could provide a framework within which actors, characters, stories and places intersected.
The road had become culturally recognizable enough to support reinterpretation.
“Shirai Gonpachi from the Fifty-three Stations of Tokaido”. Artist: Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III) ~ CHB-27
Kunisada Takes the Tōkaidō to the Theatre
For Utagawa Kunisada, the possibilities of the road naturally encountered the world he knew best: figures and kabuki. This produced a fascinating hybrid.
A station could supply the geographical identity of a print while a celebrated actor or character occupied much of the composition. Landscape and theatre were no longer separate genres. They could share the same sheet. That tells us something important about the nineteenth-century print market.
Publishers did not have to choose between “travel” and “celebrity” as rigid categories. Familiar subjects could be combined, reframed and offered to audiences in new forms. A viewer attracted by the Tōkaidō could encounter an actor. A theatre enthusiast could encounter a famous station.
The highway became a structure upon which other kinds of imagery could travel.
Collecting a Journey One Sheet at a Time
Today we encounter many famous Tōkaidō series in museum catalogues or digital databases, where dozens of sheets can be viewed almost instantly. Their original physical existence was different.
A series consisted of individual prints. Sheets could be purchased separately, handled separately and eventually dispersed separately. Some remained together; many did not. Over generations they moved through households, dealers and collections until works originally conceived as parts of the same visual journey could end up on opposite sides of the world.
That makes a group such as Bai Win’s Hokusai stations particularly interesting. Six surviving places do not reconstruct an entire Tōkaidō series. But they do something an individual example cannot.
Put Ejiri beside Kanbara, then continue through the other surviving stations, and the viewer begins to sense the organizing idea behind them. These are not simply six landscapes by the same artist. They are six surviving moments from one road.
Reading the Road
FOLLOW THE BAI WIN TŌKAIDŌ
Viewed individually, each records a particular location.
Placed back onto the route, each becomes part of a sequence.
The geographical distance between the surviving Bai Win stations also makes the incompleteness meaningful. We can see where the collection takes us—and all the stretches of road that remain represented only by a name on the map.
The missing stations are not a problem to disguise.
They reveal the original scale of the project.
More Than a Road Between Two Cities
The Tōkaidō connected Edo and Kyoto, but its importance in ukiyo-e extended well beyond transportation. It gave artists a narrative without requiring a plot.
Begin in one city. Move through a succession of named places. Arrive in another. Within that simple structure, almost anything could happen.
Hokusai could concentrate upon incidents encountered along the way. Hiroshige could transform place through season, distance and weather. Kunisada could allow the world of actors and characters to enter the geography of the road.
The same fifty-three stations remained underneath them all. What changed was the artist’s reason for showing them. Putting them back onto the road changes the question.
Ejiri is no longer simply a Hokusai print called Ejiri. It occupies a particular point in a journey. Kanbara, Okitsu, Chiryū, Fujikawa and Akasaka do the same. The spaces between them matter because they remind us that these surviving sheets once belonged to a much larger conception.
That is perhaps the most useful way to approach the Tōkaidō material in the collection. We should not treat the road merely as a subject represented in individual prints. We should use the prints to reconstruct the road.
And once we do, something interesting happens. The collection begins to move.
From the Curator’s Desk
Adam McMillan 年安瀾
Curator, Bai Win Collection
Article 4 of a 6-part campaign about Ukiyo-e: Japanese Woodblock Prints from the Floating World. All prints shown are part of the Bai Win Collection.
Discover more from Bai Win Collections
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
