New Port (with Foreign Ships)

This print almost certainly depicts Yokohama harbor following the opening of the port to foreign trade under the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854 and the subsequent commercial treaty of 1858—events that coincided with the final years of Hiroshige's career. The composition would have foregrounded the unusual sight of Western steamships or sailing vessels at anchor, their proportions and rigging unlike anything in the existing visual vocabulary of Japanese maritime prints. Hiroshige's kacho-e and landscape conventions had to accommodate unfamiliar forms, and the handling of the foreign vessels—their smoke, their hulls, their flags—would have signaled novelty to an Edo audience fascinated by the sudden intrusion of the outside world. Such yokohama-e subjects became a distinct commercial genre; this print registers the historical rupture of Japan's maritime isolation.