Jo and Uba of Takasago Looking at the Rising Sun; Symbolic Representation of Longevity and Conjugal Harmony

This surimono by Totoya Hokkei depicts the elderly couple Jo and Uba of Takasago turning toward the rising sun, a long-established emblem of married longevity drawn from the Noh play Takasago. Jo holds a rake for gathering pine needles and Uba carries a broom, their identifying attributes, while the early sun ascends behind them. Hokkei, a pupil of Katsushika Hokusai and one of the foremost designers of privately commissioned prints in early nineteenth-century Edo, treats the scene with the formal restraint expected of an auspicious New Year image. The figures stand in profile, robes detailed with careful patterning, and the sun rises as a clean disc washed in soft gradation behind them. The story of Jo and Uba, said to be the spirits of two pine trees standing in separate provinces but united in spirit, was the most familiar of all symbols of conjugal harmony in Edo culture, and surimono on this theme were a customary gift among kyoka poets at the New Year. The sheet would have been printed in a small edition with metallic pigments and karazuri blind embossing, accompanying verses by the poetry club that commissioned it. Hokkei's distinctive contribution lies in the gentle understatement of the composition: he avoids the crowding common to lesser treatments of the same subject and lets the dignity of the elderly couple and the simple geometry of the rising sun carry the meaning. The print is preserved in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and represents the way the Hokusai school adapted classical Noh imagery to the gift-print format that flourished in nineteenth-century Edo.