An American Sailing Ship off Arai

This woodblock print (nishiki-e), ink and color on paper, dated October 1872 and held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number 2007.49.243), is a single ōban Meiji-period composition by Yoshimori depicting an American sailing ship off the coast of Arai, the post station on the Tōkaidō road at the eastern entrance to Lake Hamana in present-day Shizuoka Prefecture. The image measures 36.2 by 24.1 cm and continues Yoshimori's long-running engagement with Western maritime technology — a subject he had treated repeatedly in his Bakumatsu Yokohama-e of 1860 to 1862 — now applied under the new conditions of the Meiji state. By 1872, American sailing ships and steamers were a regular sight along the Japanese coast, no longer the alien apparitions of the Black Ships era but established components of the new international trade and military presence in Japanese waters. The print's setting at Arai places the foreign vessel against the iconic landscape of the Tōkaidō, the great Edo-period highway whose stations had been the subject of Hokusai and Hiroshige series that defined Japanese landscape printing — a deliberate juxtaposition that placed the new Meiji order within the continuing tradition of Japanese meisho-e. The print is signed Ippōsai Yoshimori ga and dated October 1872. Lieberman.