Yoshida on the Tōkaidō (Tōkaidō Yoshida)

Yoshida on the Tokaido (Tokaido Yoshida), undated in the Victoria and Albert Museum's catalogue, is part of one of Katsushika Hokusai's series of designs along the great coastal highway that linked Edo and Kyoto. The Tokaido road, with its fifty-three post stations, was one of the most celebrated subjects in Edo ukiyo-e and an inexhaustible source of imagery for popular landscape printmakers. The station of Yoshida in Mikawa Province offered travellers a long wooden bridge over the Toyokawa river, and Hokusai treats the crossing with attention to engineering and human movement. As a ukiyo-e print, the composition balances the bridge as a horizontal element with the upright figures and animals that cross it, often setting them against the Pacific in the distance. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London preserves an impression that supports comparative study of Hokusai's Tokaido designs against later sets by Hiroshige and Eisen. Hokusai produced several Tokaido sequences over his career, ranging from small-format greeting prints to large landscape sheets, and the Yoshida design must be situated within this lifelong engagement with the road. The print also speaks to the popular culture of Edo travel, in which guidebooks, parodies, poems and prints together shaped the imagination of a journey that comparatively few subjects of the shogun were able to make.