Whaling off the Coast of the Goto Islands (Goto kujira tsuki), from the series "One Thousand Pictures of the Ocean (Chie no umi)"

Whaling off the Coast of the Goto Islands belongs to Katsushika Hokusai's series One Thousand Pictures of the Ocean (Chie no umi), published around 1831 as an exploration of Japan's many maritime livelihoods. The Goto Islands, off the western coast of Kyushu, were a major center of organized whaling in the Edo period; Hokusai's design shows a flotilla of small boats surrounding a vast whale near a rocky shore, with figures harpooning, netting, and shouting from craft tossed by the swells. The composition is built on vigorous diagonals of waves and boat hulls, with the dark mass of the whale anchoring the foreground and a far line of mountains receding into mist behind. As an Edo ukiyo-e print, this image is a striking example of how Hokusai used the medium to document the working geography of Japan rather than only its famous beauty spots. The Art Institute of Chicago impression preserves the dramatic blue washes and bold linework typical of the Chie no umi series. The Goto whaling print is also notable for being among the relatively few designs in any ukiyo-e print series to portray large-scale industrial labor in the natural world; it stands alongside Hokusai's better-known seascapes like the Great Wave as a meditation on the relationship between human enterprise and the immense power of the sea. Within his late career, it reflects an unusually clear-eyed interest in the lives of those who worked the coastal margins of the country.