Famous Places in Tokyo: Illustration of the Horse-Race Track at Shinobazu Pond
- Date:
- 1889
- Medium:
- Woodblock print (nishiki-e), ink and color on paper
This 1889 woodblock print ([nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e)), held by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (catalogue sc29843, museum object 270900), belongs to Utagawa Kunitoshi's series Famous Places in Tokyo and depicts the horse-race track at Shinobazu Pond in Ueno, one of the most striking new sights of late-1880s Tokyo. The Shinobazu race course, built on a circular embankment around the lotus pond at Ueno in 1884, was Japan's first Western-style turf racing facility and remained in operation only briefly — from 1884 to 1893 — before being dismantled and the site returned to public park use. During its short life it was a major Meiji-era spectacle, hosting race meetings attended by the imperial family, the diplomatic corps, and the new urban elite, and was widely depicted in newspaper illustrations, photographs, and prints. Kunitoshi's print, issued in the constitutional year of 1889, exploits the wide format to encompass the long curving track around the pond, the spectators massed along the rail, the brick-built grandstand, and the racing horses themselves in the foreground. The combination of Western infrastructure, courtly spectacle, and the traditional landscape of the Ueno hills behind makes this image one of the canonical specimens of Meiji kaika-e — a print in which the new institutions of civilised modernity are inserted into the most famous urban landscapes of the old capital. The work is held in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's collection of Japanese woodblock prints.
Famous Places in Tokyo: Illustration of the Horse-Race Track at Shinobazu Pond was created by Utagawa Kunitoshi (歌川国利) in 1889.
