Toto Nihon-bashi fukei

Toto Nihon-bashi fukei, literally 'View of Nihonbashi in the Eastern Capital,' is held in the British Museum's collection of Japanese woodblock prints and offers a Romanized-title variant of Takahashi Shotei's Nihonbashi designs. The Eastern Capital, 'Toto,' is a traditional poetic name for Edo or Tokyo, and the use of this older designation in the print's title situates it within a long line of meisho subjects that took the great bridge at Nihonbashi as their starting point. Shotei, signing as Hiroaki, treats the bridge in the calm [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) manner familiar from his collaboration with the publisher Watanabe Shozaburo, framing its railings and arches against a softly graded sky and a quiet river of boats and rafts. The [chuban](/glossary/chuban) landscape format is again the chosen size, and the printer's [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) work carries much of the atmospheric weight. The British Museum's impression is also a useful piece of evidence for how Shotei's prints traveled through European collections, often appearing in catalogues alongside Edo-period [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) because they treat the same canonical motifs. Toto Nihon-bashi fukei is therefore both a document of the shin-hanga revival's continuity with the meisho tradition and a record of the bridge's enduring symbolic role as the navel of old Edo, the point from which all distances on the Tokaido and the other great highways were measured. The print's survival in a major Western museum collection also helps offset the losses inflicted on Watanabe Shozaburo's stock by the 1923 Kanto earthquake.