Yumoto

Yumoto is a landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige, dated 1847 and held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Yumoto sits at the foot of the Hakone mountains in present-day Kanagawa Prefecture, where the Hayakawa River flows out of the highlands and where the lowest of the great Hakone hot springs has been welcoming visitors since the eighth century. Travellers on the Tokaido reached Yumoto soon after leaving Odawara and could either continue up the steep road toward the Hakone barrier and Lake Ashi or detour to soak in the village's celebrated waters. Hiroshige's print depicts the village in its valley setting, with the river, the surrounding wooded slopes, and the cluster of inns and bathhouses arranged in characteristic mountain configuration. As an Edo ukiyo-e landscape print, Yumoto belongs to Hiroshige's late-career exploration of regional travel destinations, complementing his Tokaido series with closer studies of specific spa villages and side routes. The 1847 date places the print in the period after the Hoeido Tokaido and during the years in which Hiroshige was producing series on themes from the famous places of the provinces to the seasons of Edo. Hakone's hot-spring villages, of which Yumoto was the gateway, offered an attractive cluster of subjects in which architecture, water, and mountain geography combined. The Victoria and Albert Museum's collection of nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock prints provides a rich context in which to view Yumoto, and the print can be appreciated for its restrained palette, its sense of valley enclosure, and its quiet documentation of a place whose hot springs continued to draw travellers throughout the Edo and Meiji periods.