Foreign Goods in Osaka (Osaka hikita karamono), from the series "Three Cities (Santo no uchi)"

Foreign Goods in Osaka (Osaka hikita karamono), from Totoya Hokkei's surimono series Three Cities (Santo no uchi), takes up the theme of imported luxuries traded through Osaka, the country's great commercial hub. The series as a whole — Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka — gave a kyōka poetry group an excuse to compose verses on the distinctive character of each of Japan's three major cities, and Osaka was naturally associated with mercantile abundance and with karamono, the Chinese and other foreign goods that flowed into the country through the regulated ports. Hokkei's surimono is built around a small arrangement of representative objects rather than a panoramic city view, in keeping with the more intimate, emblematic scale that the genre favored. As a senior figure in the Hokusai school of surimono designers, Hokkei was used to translating large themes into compressed still-life arrangements that could carry significant literary weight in an Edo kyoka-e exchange. The Art Institute of Chicago holds this sheet from the Three Cities series alongside other Hokkei surimono, and the print is a small but informative window onto how nineteenth-century Edo poets and connoisseurs imagined the texture of their own country's regional economy. Image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.