Famous Views of Tokyo: Fireworks at Ryōgoku Bridge

This Meiji-era woodblock print, held by the Edo-Tokyo Museum (catalogue 0191210357), depicts the great annual fireworks display at Ryōgoku Bridge on the Sumida River, one of the oldest and most celebrated summer entertainments of Edo and Tokyo. The Ryōgoku hanabi, inaugurated in the 1730s under Tokugawa Yoshimune as a memorial for victims of a cholera epidemic, became by the nineteenth century an enormous public spectacle drawing crowds from across the city; the river was filled with pleasure boats hung with lanterns, the bridge and embankments were packed with spectators, and the night sky above was lit by exploding rockets and chrysanthemum-shaped bursts. Kunitoshi's print belongs to the long tradition of Ryōgoku hanabi-e — fireworks pictures that had been a staple of Edo-period meisho-e under Hiroshige and his successors — but updates the subject to the Meiji period, incorporating the new iron Ryōgoku Bridge that replaced the wooden Edo structure in 1875 and the steamboats and gas lamps that marked the river as modern infrastructure. The composition, in the standard ōban format, exploits the contrast between the bright bursting fireworks above and the dense crowds of small figures on the bridge and boats below, with the night sky rendered in deep aniline blues and the explosions in brilliant reds and yellows. The print is preserved in the Edo-Tokyo Museum's collection of Meiji-era prints and is a representative example of Kunitoshi's engagement with the seasonal entertainments of modern Tokyo.