No. 17, Gion Festival at Tōri-itchōme (Tōri-itchōme Gion-e), from the series Comical Views of Famous Places in Edo

Gion Festival at Tōri-itchōme (Tōri-itchōme Gion-e), number 17 in Utagawa Hirokage's Edo meisho dōke zukushi ('Comical Views of Famous Places in Edo'), is a vertical ōban color woodblock print published in 1859 by Tsujiokaya Bunsuke. The print depicts the Sannō Matsuri festival procession passing through Tōri-itchōme, the first block of the great Nihonbashi mercantile street that ran south from the Nihonbashi bridge through the heart of Edo's commercial district. The series identifies the festival with the name Gion-e — a borrowing from the Kyoto Gion festival used in Edo for the Sannō and Kanda processions when their mikoshi (portable shrines) and dashi (festival floats) moved through the city. Hirokage shows the float as the engine of a comic disaster: the press of the procession sweeps spectators off their feet, and the well-organized iconography of festival display tilts toward the slapstick that characterizes the series throughout. The Tokyo Metropolitan Library holds an impression of this sheet, accessible through its open digital archive, and the print is one of the better-documented dōke zukushi designs to record an Edo festival rather than a static landscape.