Fuchu: View of the Licensed Quarter in Nichomachi (Fuchu, Nichomachi kuruwa no zu), from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)," also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido)

Fuchu: View of the Licensed Quarter in Nichomachi (Fuchu, Nichomachi kuruwa no zu) belongs to Utagawa Hiroshige's Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi), in the version sometimes called the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido), published around 1832 and held by the Art Institute of Chicago. Fuchu, the post town that grew up around the castle at modern Shizuoka, was the nineteenth station along the highway, and Nichomachi was its officially recognized pleasure quarter. Hiroshige's design moves the viewer off the main road and inside the licensed district, with a view down a street lined with the upper stories of teahouses and brothels. Travelers, courtesans, and townspeople populate the lane, their figures providing the human scale that anchors the architecture. The composition is organized around the recession of the buildings toward a vanishing point, a perspective device Hiroshige adapted from Western models to suggest urban depth. As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print expanded into the social topography of a post town, the design integrates an inscribed kyoka, a comic thirty-one-syllable poem that gives the Kyoka iri Tokaido its name; the verse provides a literary commentary on the place and links the image to popular poetry circles. The Fuchu sheet thus differs from many of Hiroshige's open-air station views by emphasizing nightlife and the regulated entertainment industry that flourished along the Tokaido, reminding viewers that travel on the highway was also a passage through a network of urban amusements.