Arai, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)," also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido)

Arai, from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi), also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido), is a landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige from around 1832 and held in the Art Institute of Chicago. Arai was the thirty-first station of the Tokaido, situated on the western shore of Lake Hamana in present-day Shizuoka Prefecture. It was best known to travellers for its barrier checkpoint (sekisho) and for the short ferry crossing required to reach it, since the route here ran across the lake mouth rather than around it. Hiroshige's print captures this maritime aspect of the station, with boats, the shoreline, and the barrier buildings arranged to evoke the controlled passage that travellers had to negotiate. The Arai sekisho was one of the more rigorously enforced checkpoints on the Tokaido, particularly attentive to women travelling without proper documents, and the daily life of inspection and ferrying gave the station an atmosphere unlike the inland post towns. The Kyoka iri Tokaido pairs each landscape with a kyoka verse, embedding the design within a literary play on its subject. As a designer of the Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, Hiroshige was attentive to the distinctive geography of each station, and at Arai he chose to make water and the boundary between land and lake the structural feature of the composition. The Art Institute of Chicago's collection preserves multiple Hiroshige Tokaido sets, and viewing Arai across his various series demonstrates how a single station could be reimagined to suit different formats, audiences, and publishing strategies of the period.