Uraga in Sagami Province (Soshu Uraga), from the series "Harbors of Japan (Nihon minato zukushi)"

Uraga in Sagami Province (Soshu Uraga), from the series "Harbors of Japan (Nihon minato zukushi)," is a circa-1835 woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige. The Harbors of Japan series turned the artist's landscape print idiom toward Japan's coastline, surveying ports and anchorages as he had earlier surveyed the Tokaido stations. Uraga, on the western shore of the Miura Peninsula at the entrance to Edo Bay, was strategically important: the shogunate maintained inspection stations there that monitored shipping moving in and out of the capital, and the harbor would become internationally famous a generation later when Commodore Perry's American squadron anchored offshore in 1853. Hiroshige's Uraga, however, presents the working bay of the late Edo period: cargo ships and fishing boats ride at anchor or move under sail across a broad expanse of blue water, with the wooded headlands of Sagami enclosing the harbor and small buildings clustering at the waterline. The artist uses bokashi to establish a deep horizon and to soften the meeting of sea, headland, and sky, his characteristic strategy for giving a Japanese landscape print a sense of climate and weather rather than mere topographical record. This impression is held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. As an example of Edo ukiyo-e applied to maritime subjects, the print expands the geography of Hiroshige's practice beyond highway and city and reminds modern viewers that his audience valued coastal scenery as much as he valued famous mountains and shrines.