Okido Barrier in the Takanawa District by the Shinagawa Post Station in the Eastern Capital

This print held by the Victoria and Albert Museum depicts the Okido barrier gate in the Takanawa district near the Shinagawa post station, the southern entrance to Edo from the Tokaido highway. The composition revisits a subject Hokuju treated in his Eastern Capital (Toto) series, the formal inspection point where travelers entering or leaving the shogunal capital were processed by Tokugawa officials. The Okido was a fortified gate with heavy wooden timbers and tile roofs, flanked by guardhouses and connecting walls, and it asserted the authority of the bakufu over movement in and out of the city. Hokuju treats the architecture with his characteristic perspective scheme, the gate and its outbuildings receding along carefully ruled diagonals to give the composition pronounced depth. Travelers in straw rain capes, porters carrying bundles, and officials in formal dress move through the foreground at scaled sizes that emphasize the monumentality of the structure. The print belongs to the iconography of the Edo gateway, a class of meisho images that documented the city's connection to the great highway network of Tokugawa Japan, and it shows Hokuju shaping that iconography in the early nineteenth century.