Twelve Views of Tokyo: Somei

Somei is one of the four surviving sheets from Toyohara Chikayoshi's Twelve Views of Tokyo held at the Edo-Tokyo Museum, depicting the famous nursery district north of central Tokyo that gave its name to the Somei Yoshino cherry — the cultivar that came to dominate Japanese cherry-tree plantings in the late nineteenth century and has remained the standard ornamental cherry ever since. The print frames a view through the Somei district's commercial flower gardens, with rows of cultivated cherry trees stretching into the distance, gardeners at work among the trees, and visitors in early Meiji dress strolling along the paths between them. Chikayoshi uses the topographical occasion to display her command of the receding orthogonal composition that the late Utagawa designers had absorbed from imported Western perspectival models, with the rows of trees drawing the eye into deep space while a single seated figure at the lower edge anchors the foreground. The palette is restrained for an 1880s Meiji print, dominated by pale pink cherry blossoms set against a soft grey-green ground, suggesting that the design was conceived as a quieter botanical study within the broader Twelve Views set rather than a saturated seasonal-event scene like the Sugamo chrysanthemums. The print is one of the more distinctive contributions to the Somei iconography from any Meiji designer, and its preservation at the Edo-Tokyo Museum makes it an important reference for Chikayoshi's topographical practice.