A Glance at Miyosaki, Yokohama

This circa-1860 diptych of woodblock prints (nishiki-e), ink and color on paper, is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number JP3316) and is one of Yoshimori's signature Yokohama-e compositions. The diptych measures 35.2 by 47.9 cm and offers a panoramic glance at Miyosaki-chō, the newly designated pleasure quarter of the Yokohama treaty port, established by the Tokugawa authorities in 1859 to accommodate foreign and Japanese visitors under the same regulatory framework that governed the licensed quarters of Edo and Kyoto. Miyosaki — the home of the famous Gankirō teahouse — rapidly became one of the most depicted locations in Yokohama-e, and Yoshimori's view sets foreign figures against the characteristic mixed architecture of the new quarter, with its Western-style frame buildings standing alongside Japanese vernacular structures. The composition draws on the energetic figural drawing and dense decorative interest that Yoshimori had inherited from his teacher Utagawa Kuniyoshi, applied here to the new ethnographic spectacle of the treaty port. The print is signed Yoshimori ga and bears the censor's seals and publisher's marks placing it in 1860, at the very beginning of the Bakumatsu Yokohama-e season. It entered the Metropolitan Museum's collection in 1959 as a gift from the choreographer and balletomane Lincoln Kirstein, whose donation of nineteenth-century Japanese prints is one of the foundations of the Met's holdings of Yokohama-e.