Illustration of a Steam Locomotive Running on the Takanawa Railroad in Tokyo (Tōkyō takanawa tetsudō jōkisha sōkō no zu)

Illustration of a Steam Locomotive Running on the Takanawa Railroad in Tokyo (Tōkyō Takanawa tetsudō jōkisha sōkō no zu) is a triptych of woodblock prints by Utagawa Kuniteru dated about 1873 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession JP3270). The print celebrates the first steam railway in Japan, opened in October 1872 between Shimbashi station in central Tokyo and the port of Yokohama, a thirty-kilometer line built by British engineers and operated initially by a mixed British and Japanese staff. The most spectacular section of the new railway ran along an embankment built out into Tokyo Bay across the shallow coastal flats at Takanawa, where the rails appeared to skim the surface of the sea between the existing shoreline and the foreign settlement. The Takanawa embankment quickly became the most-photographed and most-printed section of the line, and Kuniteru's triptych is one of the dozen or so early-Meiji prints that established its iconography: a black locomotive trailing white steam, brightly painted carriages, Japanese spectators in mixed traditional and Western dress watching from the embankment or from boats in the bay, and Mount Fuji visible across the water to the west. The print is a key example of Meiji modernization imagery and of Kuniteru's extension of Yokohama-e into specifically Tokyo subjects.