Hitachi Province

Hitachi Province is a landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), the foremost interpreter of Edo ukiyo-e meisho-e, and refers to one of the eastern provinces along the Pacific coast north of Edo, in what is now Ibaraki Prefecture. Hiroshige depicted Hitachi within several of his provincial series, most prominently the late Famous Views of the Sixty-odd Provinces (Rokujuyoshu meisho zue), in which each province received a single representative image. Hitachi was celebrated for its rugged coastline, its rice plains, and the great Kashima Shrine, all of which entered the period's imagination of provincial scenery. In characteristic fashion, Hiroshige organizes the composition around an immediately recognizable landform or local activity, framing distance with cropping at the edges of the print and tuning the sky and water with bokashi gradations that suggest a particular weather or hour. The viewer is invited to read the image both as travel literature, a virtual visit to a distant province, and as a landscape print whose pleasures lie in its formal economy and atmospheric color. Held at ukiyo-e.org, the impression contributes to a fuller picture of how Hiroshige's late provincial series mapped the political and cultural geography of Tokugawa Japan into a connected sequence of woodblock images that townspeople in Edo could acquire, collect, and use to dream of places beyond the capital.