Morning Cherry Blossoms in the New Yoshiwara (Shin Yoshiwara asazakura no zu), from the series Famous Places in the Eastern Capital (Tōto meisho)

Morning Cherry Blossoms in the New Yoshiwara (Shin Yoshiwara asazakura no zu) comes from Utagawa Hiroshige's series Famous Places in the Eastern Capital (Toto meisho), one of the artist's earlier surveys of Edo landmarks that established the format he would refine for the rest of his career as an Edo [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) landscape print designer. The subject is the licensed pleasure quarter of Yoshiwara during its annual cherry-blossom display, when transplanted [sakura](/glossary/sakura) were set up along the central avenue of Naka-no-cho and the district transformed itself, briefly, into a public spring garden. Hiroshige chooses the early morning hour, when business has slowed and the avenue is uncrowded, so that the long perspective of teahouses and lanterns can carry the eye between rows of blossoming trees toward a distant gate. The figures are sparse: a few attendants, an early visitor or two, perhaps a courtesan moving between houses. The atmosphere of the quarter, normally lit by lanterns at night, is here registered in cool morning light and the soft pink of the blossoms against tiled rooflines. The print, in the Harvard Art Museums collection, is a strong example of how Hiroshige made even the most spectacular pleasure-district subject into something closer to a meditative landscape, valued for the choreography of architecture, foliage, and sky rather than for figural anecdote. The choice of season and time of day is characteristic: he locates Yoshiwara within the seasonal cycle of Edo, treating its blossoms as kin to those of Ueno or Asukayama.