The Great Wave Off Kanagawa and Woodblock Prints
Titled ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa”, the blue wave pictured needs no introduction. Anyone who knows anything about East Asian culture can recognize the signature crescent wave, the small portrait of Mount Fuji in the background, seemingly dwarfed by an ocean of blue. To this day it remains one of Katsushika’s Hokusai’s best-known pieces, both of the collection it was a part of, ‘Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji’, and of his portfolio in general. It’s been featured and referenced in nearly everything, from the Uniqlo shirt I’m wearing as I write this to art for a Magic: the Gathering card (titled Rampant Growth, first featured in the Magic 2010 edition). But to just admire its beauty and wax poetic about how it is of ‘Japanese Spirit’, as the west tends to do with Japanese culture, does a disservice to the social, cultural, and political context that underlies the works of Hokusai, and of ukiyo-e in general.
Similar to many other cultural features of Japan and Korea, the practice of woodblock printing originated in China, back in the 4th century. It eventually was brought to Japan in the 6th century by Buddhist missionaries from Korea and China, likely through the Korean Peninsula (Newland, 1990). However, the woodblock prints of the 6th century are nothing like what they’re known for nowadays, mainly being used for reproduction of the written word (Newland, 1990, Hye-bong, 2023). In fact, the oldest surviving woodblock print is thought to be The Great Dharani Sutra, a small Buddhist scroll that was discovered in South Korea’s Gyeongju at Bulguksa Temple (Hye-bong, 2023). Additionally, prior to the Edo Period there are records in Kyoto and Kamakura of Buddhist temples in Japan printing and publishing woodblock print books. In fact, woodblock printing wasn’t really used for artwork until the Edo Period, and only really emerged as a dominant art form after the initial boom of woodblock printing that came about with the Edo Period’s arrival (Munemura, 2010, Newland, 1990).
Increasingly, the idea of a ‘closed-off Japan’ that goes in tandem with the Tokugawa Shogunate’s ‘sakoku decree’ is being challenged by Japanese scholars, but while trade relations certainly existed (and played some roles that will come up later), it was still a time of great cultural blossoming in Japan. Japanese literacy rates skyrocketed, with nearly 100% of samurai and more than half of the chonin and nomin classes being literate, and the presence of bookstores in Japan boomed as a result (Munemura, 2010). Based on current records, Edo had over 600 rental bookstores, where people would borrow a variety of different books, with genres spanning much of the ranges that modern libraries do.
Partially as a result of the ubiquity of woodblock prints, artwork of depictions of non-religious subjects grew more and more popular, branching outside of just religious depictions of the world. The earliest known Japanese ukiyo-e closely resembles Chinese sumi-e, which was mainly comprised of black ink on white paper, and early works of ukiyo-e were painted mainly on paper, folding screens, and hanging scrolls (Kikuchu, 1969).
Figure 1: An Early Woodblock Print of Hishikawa Moronobu. Dated in the late 1670s or early 1680s.
The first woodblock prints of ukiyo-e came from Hishikawa Moronobu, a well-known illustrator who started producing prints of his works in response to the increasing demand for ukiyo-e artwork. His success led to him signing his own prints and eventually releasing standalone artwork, and the prints he produced are a signpost for the beginning of the ukiyo-e era (Kikuchi, 1969, Newland, 1990).
It’s easy to think of the most defining aspect of ukiyo-e being the subtle beauty depicted in the often-muted color palettes used by artists or the delicate, tedious process of printing artwork onto wood, but I would argue that ukiyo-e’s defining characteristic comes in the origin of the name. Ukiyo-e, or 浮世絵, can be broken into ‘ukiyo’, 浮世, and ‘e’, 絵. The term ‘ukiyo’ can have many meanings, such as ‘fleeting life’, ‘floating world’ or ‘this transient world’, but the true meaning of ‘ukiyo’ within the context of the artform stems from the lifestyles that the Edo Period enabled. The economic prosperity that the Edo Period brought to Edo enabled the chonin class, made up of the merchants, craftsmen, and workers at the bottom of the social hierarchy, to live much more enjoyable lifestyles. This led to a rise in the popularity of kabuki theatre, geisha, and the pleasure district. And the term ‘ukiyo’ gradually came to describe this indulgent, easygoing, ‘floating’ world. ‘e’, or 絵, simply means a picture, drawing, depiction, or painting. Thus, ukiyo-e, or浮世絵, translates to depictions of this floating, hedonistic world. This is reflected in the topic matter of ukiyo-e, which often features beautiful ladies, the aforementioned kabuki theatre, sumo wrestlers, folk tales, scenes of travel destinations and nature, and erotica. A surprising amount of erotica.
But more importantly, the indulgent, extravagant, almost gluttonous nature led to it being the target of a number of shogunate decrees attempting to curb excess and raise moral standards, especially so since some of the individuals who benefitted most from the Edo Period’s accompanying economic surge were merchants (Newland, 1990). Merchants were traditionally viewed as a lowly class because they typically served as middlemen who cut out a profit, contributing very little if at all to society. And in a tale as old as time, the shogunate viewed ukiyo-e as a potential means to satirize and criticize the shogunate (Newland, 1990). These decrees often prohibited the use of certain paper qualities, pigments, subject matter, and even the number of blocks that could be used in printing.
But as the saying goes, “constraints breed creativity”. Artists always found ways to skirt these restrictions and altered their ukiyo-e to conform while still fundamentally being ukiyo-e, a process that often resulted in lasting features to ukiyo-e, even after restrictions were lifted (Newland, 1990). Some notable examples of this include the ‘benigirai-e’, or vermillion-hating prints, of the 1780s, and ‘aizuri-e’, or prints produced almost entirely of shades of indigo.
Figure 2: A Benigirai-e Print by Kubo Shunman made around 1787-1788. Depicts a group of women on a balcony observing a shamisen performer in the Nakadaya restaurant in Mukojima. Picture from The British Museum.
‘Aizuri-e’ and the boom in blue-dominant prints specifically were actually a combination of multiple social, economic, and political factors intersecting. Beginning in the early 1830s, the Tokugawa shogunate released a flurry of new economic policies intended to address problems in politics and economics, and solve ‘domestic unease’, that have since been dubbed the Tempo Reforms (Newland, 1990). One of the main policies within these reforms, the “Frugal Ordinance”, closed down many businesses and theatres that catered to chonin, and heavily regulated the contents of ukiyo-e prints and literature that could be published, something that lead many ukiyo-e artists to move to drawing landscapes (Newland, 1990). And within nature, one of the primary elements present is water, which requires significant usage of blue. In addition, the rise of indigo in ukiyo-e was reliant on the influx of Prussian blue into Japan (Fitzhugh, 1979). Prussian blue is the first modern synthetic dye, and since it could be mass-produced by the 19th century when it reached Japan from European trade routes, its low price was very appealing to artists and merchants alike. The resulting ‘aizuri-e’ has become some of the most well-known ukiyo-e to be printed, and there exists no better example of the features of it than the works of Katsushika Hokusai in his collection ‘Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji’, which brings us back to The Great Wave Off Kanagawa.
Figure 3: The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai, part of his collection ‘Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji’.
Katsushika Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave Off Kanagawa’ is a product of its times in a number of ways. In his lifetime, Hokusai has painted a variety of topic matter, including erotica to my surprise, but his art in the mid-19th century focuses on the natural landscape because it was the only topic matter allowed. It makes extensive use of the Prussian blue flowing into Japan, using it in combination with the white ink to depict crests of waves. A more subtle feature of the print is the relatively small color palette used. Due to the labor-intensive process of cutting wood blocks to print different colors, artists and printers worked to minimize the number of different colors of ink used (Newland, 1990). One innovation made was that different shades of the same color could often be achieved by applying paint to different parts of the print a different number of times, which is likely how the two different shades of blue in the waves were achieved (Newland, 1990). In addition, looking closely we can observe that both the uniforms of the workers on the boats and Mount Fuji are made of the same blues in the waves, and that two of the ships they’re rowing use the same shades of tan as the sky. The middle boat being a shade of red is a somewhat common feature of aizuri-e, as these prints often featured expansive blue palettes, but notably a small area of red or other color somewhere in the print (Newland, 1990).
Examining the workers rowing the ships more closely, it almost appears that they’re bowing down and prostrating themselves, submitting themselves to the high wave crests bearing down on them and the grandiose, inevitability of nature. Japan places significant cultural importance on the beauty and grandiosity of nature, something demonstrated in countless pieces of Japanese culture dating as far back as the Kojiki and Man’yoshu. Hokusai’s later works obviously don’t address the pleasure-ridden, hedonistic topic matter of pleasure districts and geisha and cover natural scenes instead, but I would argue that the ukiyo-e prints glorifying nature and its power are no less indulgent in Japanese culture (Munsterberg, 2012). In fact, I believe that The Great Wave Off Kanagawa embodies the Japanese sense of ‘wabi-sabi’ extremely well. Wabi-sabi often describes the appreciation of the natural and the imperfect, and Hokusai’s print clearly elevates the power of nature, placing the waves in the foreground to cover parts of the boats, leaping high up into the frame, and making even Mount Fuji look small and powerless in comparison.
Hokusai’s work is far from the only ukiyo-e that represents the times it came from, but I ultimately chose to represent the aspects of ukiyo-e woodblock prints through Hokusai’s work because The Great Wave Off Kanagawa is both an iconic piece of artwork and also particularly emblematic of the time period and conditions it was made in. Similar features can be observed in much of Hokusai’s ‘Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji’, even if they many not be as aesthetically pleasing, and likewise reflect the political climate they were made in, the method of woodblock printing and its drawbacks, and the different aspects of Japanese culture, all in unique ways.
Bibliography
Ch’on, Hye-bong. 200 Years before Gutenberg: The Master Printers of Koryo | The UNESCO Courier. Apr. 2023, https://courier.unesco.org/en/articles/200-years-gutenberg-master-printers-koryo.
Fitzhugh, Elisabeth West. “A Pigment Census of Ukiyo-E Paintings in the Freer Gallery of Art.” Ars Orientalis, vol. 11, 1979, pp. 27–38. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4629295.
Kikuchi, Sadao. A Treasury of Japanese Wood Block Prints (Ukiyo-e). Translated by Don Kenny, Crown Publishers, 1969.
Munemura, Izumi. “The Past, Present and Future of Printing in Japan.” Journal of The Surface Finishing Society of Japan, vol. 61, no. 12, 2010, pp. 790–94. https://doi.org/10.4139/sfj.61.790.
Munsterberg, Hugo. Arts of Japan: An Illustrated History. Tuttle Publishing, 2012.
Newland, Amy Reigle, and Chris Uhlenbeck, editors. Ukiyo-e to Shin Hanga: The Art of Japanese Woodblock Prints. 1. Aufl, The Mallard Press, 1990.
