Train Station at Shimbashi in Tokyo

This colour woodcut by Utagawa Kunitoshi, dated to the 1870s or 1880s and held by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco at the Legion of Honor (accession 1963.30.5537, image 34.3 by 23.8 cm), depicts the railway terminus at Shimbashi, one of the most celebrated symbols of Meiji modernisation. The Shimbashi station, opened in 1872 as the Tokyo terminus of Japan's first railway line, ran twenty-nine kilometres south to Yokohama and was the first regular passenger railway service in the country. Designed by the American architect Richard Bridgens in a brick-built Renaissance Revival style, the station became an instant icon of the new urban Tokyo and was depicted obsessively by Meiji-era print designers as a shorthand for the entire civilising mission of the new regime. Kunitoshi produced a number of prints of the Shimbashi terminus across the 1870s and 1880s, often combining the station with the locomotive itself, the platform crowd in Western and Japanese dress, the new horse-drawn carriages clustered around the entrance, and the gas lamps and telegraph wires that distinguished the modernised quarter. The high-keyed palette of reds, blues, and purples is characteristic of the kaika-e idiom, and the precise architectural drawing of the brick façade demonstrates the documentary impulse that runs through Kunitoshi's Meiji-modern prints. The work is preserved in the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Legion of Honor and is a representative example of the artist's engagement with the new urban infrastructure of Meiji Tokyo.