Ashinoyu

Ashinoyu is a landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige, dated 1847 and preserved in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Ashinoyu is a hot-spring village in the Hakone highlands of present-day Kanagawa Prefecture, sitting on the slopes between Lake Ashi and the higher reaches of the Hakone caldera. Long valued as one of the seven hot springs of Hakone, it was accessible to travellers on side routes off the Tokaido and became a destination for those seeking the medicinal waters and cool mountain air of the volcanic plateau. Hiroshige's print captures the village's elevated setting, with peaked rooflines of the inns set against the rising flanks of the surrounding hills and the steam-prone slopes for which the area is known. As an example of the Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, Ashinoyu represents Hiroshige's mature interest in the lesser-known waypoints around Hakone, complementing his many Tokaido designs that passed through the main Hakone station on Lake Ashi. By the late 1840s Hiroshige had begun to produce series of print sets on specific localities, and Hakone with its constellation of hot-spring villages provided rich subject matter. The Victoria and Albert Museum's holdings of Hiroshige include strong representation of his later landscape work, and Ashinoyu fits among prints that document the regional travel culture of late Edo Japan. The image rewards attention to its quiet composition, its modest scale, and the way Hiroshige uses architectural punctuation to convey the relationship of village to mountain. For collectors of nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock prints, it offers a glimpse of how Hiroshige approached the Hakone hot springs as a coherent subject in their own right.