Mishima Pass in Kai Province (Kōshū Mishima-goe)

From the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji of 1831, this print by Katsushika Hokusai depicts travelers crossing the Mishima Pass in Kai Province (modern-day Yamanashi Prefecture), where a colossal ancient tree dominates the composition and Mount Fuji rises in the distance beyond. The composition presents the enormous trunk of the tree in close foreground view, with three travelers reaching their arms around its base to measure or embrace it, while the path continues into the haze of the mountain pass. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, the sheet uses the contrast of monumental nature in the foreground with the equally monumental distant Fuji to produce one of the most striking visual jokes in the entire series: the tree, an aged sacred specimen of the kind venerated at countless Japanese shrines, is treated with the same gravity as the mountain itself. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds an impression of the print within its Hokusai collection. The print is also a careful study of scale; the proportions of the figures, the trunk, and the receding pass are calibrated so that the viewer feels both the height of the tree and the cool vastness of the surrounding landscape. The composition rests on the strong vertical of the tree, broken by the spreading horizontal of its lowest branches, with Fuji's silhouette appearing as a counterweight in the distance. Hokusai's palette of soft greens and browns, accented by the cool blue of Fuji and the sky, creates a particularly serene atmosphere. The print speaks to the late Edo culture of veneration for ancient trees as kami-bearing entities and remains one of the most beloved sheets in the Thirty-six Views for its inventive combination of religious feeling, observational humor, and compositional rigor.