Army Headquarters Building

Army Headquarters Building, recorded on [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org, is a late or Meiji-era sheet attributed to a Hiroshige and shows how the Edo ukiyo-e landscape print convention persisted into the era of modernization. The subject is one of the new Western-style government buildings erected in central Tokyo in the early Meiji period, most likely a chinju-fu or military headquarters of the new conscript army. The format is familiar from Hiroshige's earlier views of Edo: a broad street or open ground in the foreground, a frontal arrangement of the principal building in the middle distance, and a clean horizon above. The architectural style, however, departs entirely from Edo precedent. Brick masonry, regularly spaced windows, a hipped tile roof, and what may be a small clock tower or pediment are observed with the same patience the studio had given to temple gates and bridge piers a generation earlier. Carriages, soldiers in Western uniform, and pedestrians dressed in mixed Japanese and Western styles populate the foreground, registering the visual hybridity of the Meiji street. As a [Yokohama-e](/glossary/yokohama-e) and kaika-e print, this sheet documents how the Utagawa Hiroshige studio name remained commercially useful well past 1858 and how the landscape print continued to do the work of explaining a changing city to its own residents.