Historical Topics

A Little About Ukiyo-e and Hokusai

Beginning in 1603, the start of what is called the Edo period in Japan, the Tokugawa Shōgunate put into place several measures designed to end centuries of civil war. The period is named for the country’s new capital, Edo, or modern-day Tōkyō. Among them was a legally defined, rigid social structure with merchants on the very bottom, an education system based on Confucian teachings, isolation from the outer world for two and a half centuries, and draconian suppression of regional warlords or Daimyōs. Working together, these four things with the help of others brought into being a type of art known as Japanese woodblock prints or ukiyo-e, art with modest beginnings that has come to have a major influence around the world today.

Isolation sheltered Japanese artists from outside influences, allowing Japanese art to evolve in its own unique directions. The rise of education created a demand for texts, many of which began to include illustrations, printed on carved woodblocks (hanga). One of the suppression methods used against Daimyōs was the requirement that they spend half of each year in Edo under the watchful eye of the Shōgun. In the other half while Daimyōs attended to their local regional affairs, family members were held hostage in Edo. To hold on to what prestige they had, Daimyōs had to maintain large costly retinues of soldiers and other attendants in Edo as well as those needed in their home districts. One of the consequences is that Edo, grown to have a population of more than a million people, became, in the words of a contemporary, a "city of bachelors." The great need for goods and services provided by merchants brought about a flow of wealth from aristocrats to the lower classes, however sumptuary laws placed restrictions on how artisans and merchants could use that new-found wealth.

Outlets for all that money in the hands of the lower classes arose in the form of tea houses, kabuki theaters, and brothels. The disproportionately large number of single men in Edo represented a market opportunity that couldn’t be ignored, so a new form of entertainment was soon created; pornography. Illustrators for textbooks discovered that there was a market for certain kinds of pictures--pictures that didn’t need to go along with text. Ukiyo-e was born.

Ukiyo-e

The literal meaning of ukiyo-e is pictures of the floating world. Ukiyo was a Buddhist religious concept referring to the ephemeral nature of human life. A 17th century book by Asai Ryoi titled Tales of the Floating World caused the term to mean a certain style of life described as,

"living only for the moment, gazing at the moon, snow, cherry blossoms and autumn leaves, enjoying wine, women and song, drifting along with the current of life, like a gourd floating down a river."

By adding the suffix “e”, ukiyo becomes ukiyo-e, pictures of the floating world.

While ukiyo-e started with pornography, it quickly began to depict other images of the floating world. They were popular with women, for example, who bought pictures of courtesans wearing the latest clothing fashions and sporting elaborate hairdos. An entire category of prints was called bijinga, pictures of beautiful people. Many other categories of pictures were eventually in vogue. Pictures related to Kabuki theater were widely popular, and the height of that genre was reached by Sharaku (fl. 1794-1795), considered to be one of the finest portrait artists in the world. The landscapes made famous by Hokusai (1760-1849) and Hiroshige (1798-1858) appeared late in the Edo period.

For detailed information about how ukiyo-e prints were made, see the Wikipedia article, Woodblock printing in Japan.

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)

Born of the poor Katsushika peasant family on the outskirts of Edo, Hokusai was early apprenticed to a maker of mirrors. Restless, he looked for something more suited to his tastes, and soon apprenticed himself to an ukiyo-e engraver. By the age of eighteen, he was working in the prestigious studio of Katsukawa Shunsho, illustrating books under the gagō (artist’s name) of Shunro. Over the years, he studied just about every style of art available to him, taking a new gagō for each style—over fifty of them—eventually settling on Hokusai. He also moved his home ninety-three times during his life, and several times had disputes with seniors that got him into trouble. Sometime after Shunsho’s death, Hokusai was kicked out of the Katsukawa school.

In the early 1820s, he began work on his masterpiece, Thirty Six Views of Mt. Fuji, later expanded to forty-six views. Hokusai's Great Wave is part of the original series. He published many other series, including Eight Views of Waterfalls and a series depicting each of the stations of the Tōkaidō, the government’s road between Edo and Kyōto where the emperor resided, that later influenced Hiroshige. Among his books are One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji containing a completely different set of pictures than his earlier ones, and Hokusai Manga, an encyclopedic book on painting technique including western techniques. Many of his landscapes are among the most famous in the world and are still influencing artists today.

At one point when using the gagō Gakyō Rōjin (old man mad about painting) Hokusai wrote:

“From the age of six I had a penchant for copying the form of things, and from about fifty, my pictures were frequently published; but until the age of seventy, nothing that I drew was worthy of notice. At seventy-three years, I was somewhat able to fathom the growth of plants and trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects, and fish. Thus when I reach eighty years, I hope to have made increasing progress, and at ninety to see further into the underlying principles of things, so that at one hundred years I will have achieved a divine state in my art, and at one hundred and ten, every dot and every stroke will be as though alive. Those of you who live long enough, bear witness that these words of mine prove not false.”

Hokusai died at the age of eighty-nine.

For a further look at the art of Hokusai read the following: Waves