Star Festival at Yanagishima

Star Festival at Yanagishima is an 1856 print by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858), depicting the celebration of Tanabata, the Star Festival, at Yanagishima in eastern Edo. Tanabata, held on the seventh day of the seventh month, commemorates the once-yearly meeting of the celestial lovers Orihime and Hikoboshi across the Milky Way, a legend imported from Chinese tradition and elaborated in Japanese popular practice. The festival is marked by tying poem slips to bamboo branches set up outside homes and shops, and Hiroshige's view at Yanagishima captures this ephemeral urban decoration as it transformed an Edo neighborhood. Yanagishima was a riverside district east of the Sumida, named for its willow trees and associated with the Yanagishima Myoken-do shrine, which drew visitors for both religious observance and seasonal viewing. As a landscape print in the broader meisho-e tradition of Edo ukiyo-e, Star Festival at Yanagishima combines a topographically specific setting with the time-bound atmospherics that Hiroshige made central to his late style: the festival appears as a particular evening, with bamboo poles rising above rooftops and the festival's pageantry registering against the broader cityscape. The 1856 date places this print in the final years of Hiroshige's career, contemporary with the One Hundred Famous Views of Edo project on which his late reputation rests. The work participates in the same impulse to inventory Edo's neighborhoods and seasonal festivities as that great series, treating the city as a layered tapestry of named places and recurring rituals. This impression is preserved in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.