The Takanawa Steam Railway, Tokyo (Tōkyō Takanawa jōki tetsudō)

This 1872 ōban color woodblock triptych by Utagawa Kuniteru II, held by the Edo-Tokyo Museum (accession 0191220236), depicts the Takanawa stretch of the new Tokyo–Yokohama railway as it passes along the shoreline of Edo Bay. The Takanawa embankment — a raised stone causeway built across the shallows of Shinagawa Bay to support the railway track — was one of the most spectacular engineering features of the inaugural Tokyo–Yokohama line, completed in October 1872 under the supervision of British railway engineers including Edmund Morel.

Kuniteru II's triptych shows the steam locomotive and its passenger carriages traversing the embankment, with sail-rigged Japanese fishing boats in the bay below and the silhouette of distant Tokyo or Yokohama at the horizon. The composition belongs to his small cycle of railway prints that includes the Metropolitan Museum's Steam Train Passing Shiodome (accession DP147709) — together producing the most extensive single-artist documentation of the early Tokyo–Yokohama railway in the Meiji print corpus.

The Takanawa embankment itself was a contested piece of infrastructure: the Japanese government had to negotiate with the daimyo of the Shinagawa coastal estates, with fishermen whose customary rights crossed the shallows, and with the British engineers whose designs called for fill and dredging on a scale unprecedented in Japanese civil engineering. The completed embankment became one of the visual icons of the early Meiji modernization, and Kuniteru II's triptych is among the earliest woodblock-print depictions of that engineering achievement, published within a few months of the railway's October 1872 opening.