THE FIFTY-THREE STATIONS OF THE TOKAIDO

This sheet, catalogued in the Harvard Art Museums simply as The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, is one print from one of Utagawa Hiroshige's many Tokaido series, the body of work that established him as the leading designer of Edo ukiyo-e landscape prints. The Tokaido, the great road between Edo and Kyoto, comprised fifty-three official post stations between the two capitals and one additional approach on either end. Hiroshige first treated the road as a complete series in 1833 in the Hoeido edition, and he returned to the same itinerary repeatedly through the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s in editions known to scholarship by the names of their publishers and formats: Reisho, Gyosho, Kyoka, Vertical, and others. Each station became, in his hands, a self-contained composition: a landscape, a weather condition, a small figural anecdote, and a careful balance of foreground and distance. Without a precise series identification, the present Harvard sheet stands as a useful example of how the road as a whole was imagined in Edo print culture: a sequence of distinct local sights bound into a single national itinerary. Travelers used such prints as souvenirs; armchair viewers used them as imaginative substitutes for the journey itself, and the cumulative effect of Hiroshige's Tokaido designs was to make the road one of the most thoroughly visualized cultural artifacts of the late Edo period.