The Fish Stall in Tokio

Ozawa Nankoku's only documentary street scene in the Griffis volume, and one of the few illustrations in the book that depicts contemporary Meiji-period life rather than a folkloric or mythological subject. The plate shows a Tokyo fish stall in cross-section: a wooden counter laid with whole fish, a shopkeeper at right weighing or wrapping a customer's purchase, several patrons in kimono examining the wares, and the tools and baskets of a working market hung from the eaves. The drawing combines genre observation with the kind of clear pedagogical labelling that Griffis required for his English-language audience, identifying the most recognisable fish without crowding the composition. Ozawa's line, smoothly translated by Henry W. Troy in New York, gives the figures a relaxed naturalism that contrasts with the more stylised mythological plates: the customer's slight stoop towards the counter, the merchant's practiced quickness with the scale, the leaning weight of the elderly observer are all observed from contemporary Tokyo street life. Within the larger picture of Meiji visual culture the print belongs to the same documentary tradition as the work of Kawanabe Kyōsai's pupils and the early shinbun-nishikie illustrators.