New Year’s Eve Foxfires at the Changing Hackberry Tree in Ōji

Utagawa Hiroshige's 1857 landscape print of New Year's Eve foxfires at the changing hackberry tree in Oji is among the most visually arresting designs in his late series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei). The composition shows a great old hackberry on a moonlit plain, with dozens of foxes gathered around its base, ghostly flames floating above their heads like lanterns. According to the legend Hiroshige illustrates, foxes from across the Kanto region converged on this tree on the last night of the year, donned ceremonial robes, and processed to the nearby Oji Inari Shrine to receive their assignments as messengers of the rice deity; villagers read the pattern of the foxfires to predict the coming year's harvest. Oji lay in the northern outskirts of Edo, an area associated with rice paddies, springs, and Inari worship, and the shrine remains a center of fox-related cult activity today. Hiroshige sets the scene in deep blue night, with bokashi gradation in the sky, careful registration of the warm yellow flames, and a quiet bonfire on the right horizon. The design unites Edo ukiyo-e landscape print conventions with folkloric imagination, presenting a numinous rural ceremony at the gates of the city. This impression is preserved in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, where it documents both Hiroshige's late virtuosity and the enduring presence of fox-deity belief in the popular religious landscape of nineteenth-century Edo.