View of the Port of Uraga in Sagami Province

View of the Port of Uraga in Sagami Province, dated 1855 and preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum, is a landscape print produced shortly after one of the most consequential events of late Edo history: Commodore Perry's American squadron had anchored off Uraga in 1853 and 1854, opening the long-closed port and accelerating the political crisis of the Tokugawa state. Utagawa Hiroshige's view sets aside that drama in favor of a recognizable working harbor. Uraga, at the southern end of the Miura Peninsula commanding the entrance to Edo Bay, was already a significant inspection station for ships approaching the shogunal capital. The print presents the harbor from a hillside vantage: the deep inlet curves into the foreground, lined with the rooftops of shoreside houses, while small Japanese coastal vessels are arrayed at anchor and on the water beyond. Wooded headlands close the bay on either side, and a strip of open sea hints at the wider Pacific. The palette—blue and grey-green for water and sky, warm browns for the timbered buildings—holds together a busy composition, and graded washes give the bay its sense of recession. As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, the design is a careful record of place, but the choice of subject in the mid-1850s carries its own freight: by recording Uraga at all, Hiroshige situates one of his late views at a site that had recently become a focal point of national anxiety and historical change.