Komatsuya Hyakki

Komatsuya Hyakki (小松屋百亀, 1720-1794) was an Edo merchant, poet, and amateur ukiyo-e designer whose place in the history of Japanese woodblock printing rests less on the volume of his surviving prints than on the specific cultural moment he occupied. A wealthy proprietor of the Komatsuya, a medicine shop at Iida-machi in Edo, Hyakki belonged to the network of cultivated samurai-class hatamoto, prosperous townsmen, and haikai poets whose collaborative experiments with private calendar prints (e-goyomi) during 1765 produced the technological and aesthetic breakthrough that historians have long credited as the birth of full-color nishiki-e (brocade pictures). In the small body of chuban-format prints he designed during 1765 and 1766, most of which survive today only in the Clarence Buckingham Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, Hyakki worked at the experimental edge of a printing revolution that he himself helped finance and direct.

Hyakki's family business, the Komatsuya, was a well-established kusuriya (apothecary) in the Iidamachi district of Edo, in the area north of the shogunal castle where merchant houses of substance had long clustered. The Komatsuya name (literally 'little pine shop') was the kind of poetic commercial appellation favored by wealthy Edo merchants of the period, and the family's prosperity gave Hyakki the leisure and disposable income to cultivate the literary and artistic accomplishments characteristic of his class. He took the personal name Hyakki, meaning 'hundred turtles' (the turtle being a Chinese auspicious emblem of longevity), and was active in the cultivated haikai poetry circles that flourished in mid-eighteenth-century Edo. His other artistic name, Hyakkien, appears in poetry collections of the period, and several surimono (privately printed luxury prints) and haikai books of the late eighteenth century carry his verses or his designs.

The central event of Hyakki's artistic biography, and the reason he is remembered in standard histories of ukiyo-e, is his participation in the 1765 calendar print exchange that produced the first true polychrome nishiki-e. In Meiwa 2 (1765), the Edo cultural figures Ōkubo Jinshirō Tadanobu (a samurai amateur poet and painter), Abe Hachinoshin Masahiro, and Hyakki himself organized a private exchange of e-goyomi (picture calendars) among members of an elite haikai poetry circle. These calendar prints encoded the long and short months of the lunar year within the picture composition itself (numbers hidden in fan patterns, kimono designs, garden lanterns, and the like), and they were commissioned by wealthy amateurs from professional designers and printers to be exchanged as elegant New Year's gifts. The patrons of the 1765 exchange spared no expense, demanding registration of multiple color blocks with kento (corner-and-edge registration marks) of unprecedented precision, the use of expensive imported and domestic pigments, the application of gold and silver leaf, gauffrage (blind embossing) for tactile texture, and thick custom-made hosho papers. The professional designer most often associated with the breakthrough is Suzuki Harunobu (c. 1725-1770), but Hyakki himself also designed and signed a number of chuban prints in the same campaign, and the works that survive demonstrate the same technical opulence: full color, multiple blocks in perfect register, metallic accents, and the chuban (medium-format) sheet size that became the standard ukiyo-e format for the next decade.