The Famous Places on the Tokaido in One View (Tokaido meisho ichiran)

The Famous Places on the Tokaido in One View (Tokaido meisho ichiran) is a Katsushika Hokusai ukiyo-e work of 1813 in the Art Institute of Chicago. The Tokaido was the great coastal highway linking Edo to Kyoto, with fifty-three official post stations along its length, and it dominated Edo ukiyo-e landscape imagery as a subject. Most artists handled the road station by station, but Hokusai's design takes the opposite approach, compressing the entire route into a single panoramic view so the eye travels along it as it would on a map. The result is a remarkable hybrid of pictorial print and cartographic information, a tradition known as meisho ichiran, in which sites are not just located but characterized by small attached vignettes. By drawing the road as one continuous sweep, Hokusai gives the viewer something Hiroshige's later Tokaido series would not, an immediate sense of the highway's geography, including the relative position of mountains, river crossings and Mount Fuji along the way. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, the sheet is also a piece of practical visual culture, suited to travelers planning a journey or recalling one. The Art Institute of Chicago records the work within its Japanese print holdings.