True Pictures of Famous Places in Tokyo: Kuramae Street

Kuramae, in the Asakusa district, was a major wholesale commercial center during the Edo and Meiji periods, home to rice brokers, toy wholesalers, and the storehouses of the old shogunal rice granaries ("kura" meaning storehouse, "mae" meaning front). The street scene here likely depicts the broad commercial thoroughfare lined with merchant establishments, storehouses with distinctive tile and plaster construction, and the busy foot and cart traffic of a wholesale district. Yasuji's composition may adopt a perspectival street view, using the converging lines of the roadway and rooflines to create depth — a technique influenced by Western perspective drawing absorbed through Kiyochika's studio practice. Figures in a variety of occupational dress animate the scene: merchants, deliverymen with carts or carrying poles, and customers. The print documents a commercial streetscape whose physical character — the low merchant townhouses with their latticed facades and projecting eaves — was giving way to more permanent construction as Meiji modernization reshaped the capital's commercial districts.