Tōto shōkei ichiran

Tōto shōkei ichiran is an illustrated book by Katsushika Hokusai held by the Art Institute of Chicago. The title can be rendered as 'A Comprehensive View of the Famous Sights of the Eastern Capital,' the Eastern Capital being Edo, modern Tokyo, where Hokusai lived and worked for most of his life. The album presents a sequence of vignettes drawn from across the city, integrating bridges, riverbanks, temples, markets, and seasonal observances into a portable visual gazetteer of the capital. As a ukiyo-e print designer who came of age within Edo's printmaking industry, Hokusai was uniquely positioned to articulate the city's character on paper, and the volume sits comfortably beside his many single-sheet views of bridges, festivals, and crowds. The Art Institute of Chicago preserves the album within its Japanese illustrated-book collection, where it complements his landscape series and his Manga by focusing specifically on urban subjects. For Edo ukiyo-e audiences the book served both as a souvenir and as a reference, allowing readers to revisit the city's sights at leisure and to imagine corners they had not yet visited. For modern scholars it is a key document of how nineteenth-century Edo presented itself in pictorial form, blending guidebook reportage with the genre conventions of ukiyo-e print design under Hokusai's distinctive eye.