Famous Views of the Tōkaidō: Watching the Races

A nishiki-e by Utagawa Kunitaka from a Tōkaidō series, held at the Edo-Tokyo Museum, depicting figures watching a horse race in what is presented as one of the famous views (meisho) of the Tōkaidō highway. The Tōkaidō - the great eastern coastal road connecting Edo and Kyoto, with its fifty-three official post stations laid out by the early-Tokugawa shogunate - had supplied Edo print culture with one of its most enduring serial subjects since Hiroshige's celebrated Hōeidō Tōkaidō series of 1833-1834, and successive generations of Utagawa-school designers continued to issue new Tōkaidō series throughout the nineteenth century, varying the subject and format to suit changing market tastes. Late-Edo Tōkaidō series often combined the topographic identification of post stations with non-topographic subjects appropriate to each location: historical events associated with the station, kabuki plays set there, famous local products, seasonal observances, or, as in the present print by Kunitaka, contemporary spectacles such as horse racing that might have taken place along the route. Horse racing was associated in particular with the Kamo Shrine in Kyoto (where the kurabeuma ceremony was held annually in the fifth month) and with several other sites along the inland and coastal corridors, making it a subject naturally suited to a Tōkaidō meisho-e treatment. The 1863 date places the print in the same year as Kunitaka's celebrated triptych Imperial Visit to a Horse Race, suggesting a sustained interest in equestrian subjects in his production of that year - a likely commercial response to the political prominence of horse racing in the Bunkyū-era ceremonial exchanges between the shogunate and the imperial court.