A True View of a Trading House of a Yokohama Merchant

This 1861 [triptych](/glossary/triptych) of vertical ōban woodblock prints ([nishiki-e](/glossary/nishiki-e)) by Utagawa Sadahide, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number JP3245), depicts the interior or facade of a foreign trading house (shōkan) in the newly opened port of Yokohama. The composition combines three vertical sheets into a unified image roughly 36.5 by 74.3 cm and uses the height of the vertical format to emphasize the multi-storey scale of the Western-style buildings that were rapidly rising in the foreign settlement during the years immediately after Yokohama's opening to international trade in 1859. The print is part of Sadahide's prolific output of [Yokohama-e](/glossary/yokohama-e) during 1860-1861, when he was the dominant designer of the genre and worked closely with Edo publishers eager to supply the popular demand for images of the new port. The 'true view' (shashin no zu) in the title is a familiar Edo-print convention asserting documentary accuracy — the suggestion that the print records an actual building and its activities rather than a generic scene — and Sadahide's compositions in this vein gave their audiences a vivid sense of the architectural and commercial novelty of the foreign settlement. The print is held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection of Japanese woodblock prints and is a representative example of Sadahide's mature Yokohama-e practice.