Okitsu: Kiyomigaseki and Seiken Temple (Kiyomigaseki, Seikenji)—No. 18, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)," also known as the Reisho Tokaido

Okitsu, the seventeenth post station on the Tokaido (numbered as the eighteenth sheet when the Nihonbashi starting point is included), occupied a narrow coastal strip in Suruga Province where the highway threaded between the sea and the steep flanks of the Satta Pass. In this 1842 landscape print from Utagawa Hiroshige's Reisho Tokaido series, the artist couples the station with two of its best-known landmarks: the old barrier site at Kiyomigaseki and the Zen temple of Seikenji, long associated with Tokugawa patronage and views over Suruga Bay. The Reisho Tokaido takes its nickname from the clerical-script calligraphy in the title cartouches and was published by Maruseiya Jinpachi as Hiroshige's reworking of a route he had already explored in his celebrated Hoeido edition of the early 1830s. As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, the sheet is built around the meeting of mountain, pine grove, and water that made Okitsu a favorite stop for travelers and a recurring subject in Hiroshige's output. Rooftops of the temple complex, gnarled pines along the shore, and small figures on the road give the viewer reference points against the broader sweep of bay and headland. The Art Institute of Chicago's impression preserves the muted palette and crisp linework characteristic of the Reisho series, and contributes to its substantial documentation of how Edo print publishers serialized the Tokaido into easily collected, station-by-station sets.