Steam Train Passing Shiodome in Tokyo (Tōkyō Shiodome o tōru jōki kikansha)

This 1872 color woodblock triptych by Utagawa Kuniteru II, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession DP147709), depicts the steam train of the new Tokyo–Yokohama railway passing through Shiodome in Tokyo. The railway, inaugurated on the fourteenth of October 1872, was the first stretch of Japanese steam rail and the single most-celebrated technological monument of the early Meiji period. The Shiodome terminus, located near the foreign-settlement quarter at Tsukiji and the great Hamarikyū gardens of the former shogunal estate, became the iconic visual emblem of Meiji modernization in the first months after the railway's opening.

Kuniteru II's composition deploys the conventional ōban triptych format of late-Edo and early-Meiji ukiyo-e to encompass a panoramic view of the steam locomotive and its passenger carriages in motion. The brilliant red of the locomotive boiler and the bright aniline pigments of the train's livery are characteristic of early-Meiji color printing, which adopted the new synthetic aniline dyes introduced from Europe in the 1860s. The composition belongs to a small cycle of Kuniteru II's railway prints that includes the related Takanawa Steam Railway triptych in the Edo-Tokyo Museum (accession 0191220236) and that represents the height of the Meiji kaika-e (enlightenment print) genre.

The print was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum among its substantial Meiji-era kaika-e holdings, where it documents both the visual representation of the Meiji modernization program and the late-Edo print industry's response to that program. The locomotive itself — among the first batch of locomotives imported from the British manufacturer Vulcan Foundry — appears repeatedly in Meiji-era prints by Kuniteru II and his contemporaries Hiroshige III and Yoshitora, each of whom recorded the early stretches of the new railway as the defining image of the modernization era.