The Seaweed-gathering Ritual in Nagato Province (Nagato mekari no shinji), from the series "Famous Places in the Provinces (Shokoku meisho)"

Totoya Hokkei composed this surimono around 1829 as part of his series "Famous Places in the Provinces (Shokoku meisho)," depicting the seaweed-gathering ritual (mekari shinji) in Nagato Province in western Honshu. The mekari shinji is an ancient Shinto ceremony performed at the beginning of the lunar year, in which priests cut sacred seaweed (wakame) at low tide as a propitiatory offering for a prosperous fishing season. The ritual was particularly associated with shrines along the Kanmon Strait, where the meeting of swift currents made the gathering a dramatic and dangerous event. Hokkei renders the ceremony with the documentary attention to local custom that characterized the meisho tradition, blending pictorial design with ethnographic specificity. As a senior pupil of Katsushika Hokusai, Totoya Hokkei specialized in surimono throughout his career. These privately commissioned deluxe prints were used by kyoka poetry clubs to mark seasonal occasions, and they combined striking imagery with kyoka comic verses on heavy paper enriched with metallic pigments and embossing. The series "Famous Places in the Provinces" extended the well-established meisho tradition into the surimono format, allowing Hokkei to pair each provincial subject with poetry composed by club members. The Art Institute of Chicago, which preserves this impression, holds substantial strength in early nineteenth-century Japanese surimono. The technical refinements visible in the work, the careful color registration of the priests' robes, the embossing that gives texture to waves and rocks, and the metallic pigments, all reflect the heightened production standards characteristic of the surimono tradition and the broader achievements of the Hokusai school.