Festival float of Tsutsui Jomyo fighting Ichirai Hoshi on the Uji Bridge

Festival float of Tsutsui Jomyo fighting Ichirai Hoshi on the Uji Bridge, designed by Katsushika Hokusai around 1820, transposes a celebrated episode from the Genpei wars onto the surface of an Edo-period festival cart. The warrior monk Tsutsui Jomyo Meishu and the upstart Ichirai Hoshi famously clashed atop the Uji Bridge during the 1180 battle described in the Tale of the Heike, and here Hokusai reimagines that medieval duel as a sculptural tableau mounted on a wheeled float for a town procession. As a designer working within the Edo ukiyo-e tradition, Hokusai treats the festival's painted figures as a picture within a picture, allowing him to combine the high drama of military legend with the colorful pageantry of urban ritual. The composition emphasizes overlapping armor plates, the planks of the bridge, and the bold silhouettes of the two combatants, qualities that translate confidently into the multi-block printing process. Each impression of this ukiyo-e print preserves Hokusai's calligraphic line and the densely worked color blocks that distinguish his surimono and special-edition prints from the same period. The Art Institute of Chicago, where this impression is held, records the work as part of Hokusai's lifelong fascination with warrior subjects, festival culture, and Japan's narrative past. For collectors and students of Katsushika Hokusai, the design illustrates how the artist mediated between popular entertainment and classical literature, showing why his print designs remained influential across both refined and demotic audiences in nineteenth-century Edo.