Chofu Jewel River in Musashi Province (Musashi Chofu), from the series "Six Jewel Rivers (Mu Tamagawa no uchi)"

Chofu Jewel River in Musashi Province (Musashi Chofu) is an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige from around 1830, designed for the series Six Jewel Rivers (Mu Tamagawa no uchi) and held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The mu Tamagawa, or Six Jewel Rivers, are a classical poetic grouping of six different streams across Japan, each evoked in waka poetry with specific seasonal and emotional associations. The Tamagawa in Musashi Province, near present-day Tokyo, was traditionally linked with women fulling cloth on its banks, an image that came to stand for autumn melancholy and rustic labor. Hiroshige's print situates figures along the Chofu stretch of the river, where they engage in the work of preparing cloth, set within a softly modeled landscape of open fields, distant hills, and graded sky. The composition balances the human figures with the sweep of the riverbank, while subtle bokashi gradations evoke a particular season and time of day. The Art Institute of Chicago documents the sheet as part of Hiroshige's Six Jewel Rivers series, situating it within a project that translated classical poetic imagery into accessible Edo ukiyo-e landscape print form. As a Utagawa Hiroshige design, the print exemplifies the artist's interest in linking nineteenth-century print culture to classical literary tradition, using meisho-e to deepen the resonance of well-known places. For collectors and scholars, Musashi Chofu offers important evidence of how Hiroshige treated poetic geography, embedding allusions to literature within the apparently descriptive landscape mode. The print continues to inform research on the intersection of waka poetics, regional identity, and the meisho-e genre in late Edo Japan.