Miya, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)," also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido)

Miya, from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi), also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido), is a landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige produced around 1832 and held in the Art Institute of Chicago. Miya was the forty-first station of the Tokaido, situated at the precincts of the great Atsuta Jingu shrine in present-day Nagoya, and it served as the embarkation point for the seven-ri ferry across Ise Bay to Kuwana. The station was therefore both a sacred site and a logistical hub, and Hiroshige's designs of Miya often emphasised the shrine's torii, the activity of the harbour, or the festivities associated with the Atsuta matsuri. The Hoeido Miya is famously a night scene of running men hauling lanterns during the festival, and the Kyoka iri Tokaido version offers a different interpretation paired with a kyoka verse. As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, Miya benefits from the unusual combination of religious gravity and commercial bustle that distinguished it from purely inland post towns. The print's location in the Art Institute of Chicago places it within an exceptionally strong group of Hiroshige Tokaido holdings, allowing the Kyoka iri Miya to be compared with the Hoeido design and with later Tokaido versions Hiroshige produced through the 1840s and 1850s. The work invites attention to how Hiroshige negotiated the difficult task of representing places that were many things at once, sacred, civic, mercantile, and how his repeated returns to these complex sites built up over time into a layered portrait of the Tokaido road as a whole.