Nihonbashi

Nihonbashi (日本橋, 'Japan bridge') is the bridge in central Tokyo originally built in 1603 as the starting point of the five Edo-period highways and the symbolic kilometer zero of the Japanese road system. A subject treated by Hokusai and Hiroshige before him in their Tōkaidō and meisho series, in Hakutei's hands the bridge is approached through the sensibility of a twentieth-century artist trained in yoga (Western-style) painting. The print likely depicts the rebuilt stone bridge of 1911 — with its bronze kirin and lion finials — possibly framed by the elevated railway and surrounding stone-and-brick buildings, or a view of the Nihonbashi River with cargo boats. As a founding member of the Nihon Sosaku Hanga Kyokai (1918), Hakutei treated urban Tokyo not as a romanticized Edo survival but as a working modern city. The mokuhanga technique remains traditional — carved cherry blocks, [washi](/glossary/washi), [baren](/glossary/baren) — while the color and composition register the modernist eye visible across his oils and watercolors.