Vehicles on the Streets of Tokyo (Tokyo orai kuruma zukushi)

This 1870 color woodblock print (nishiki-e) triptych in the standard ōban format, held by the Art Institute of Chicago (accession number 1926.1768), is one of Utagawa Yoshitora's most celebrated documents of early Meiji modernity. Titled "Vehicles on the Streets of Tokyo" (Tokyo ōrai kuruma zukushi), it depicts the riotous mixture of traditional and Western conveyances that characterized the streets of the newly renamed capital in the first years after the Meiji Restoration. Horse-drawn carriages of European design, rickshaws (jinrikisha) that had been invented in Tokyo only the previous year, palanquins, ox-carts, and pedestrians of every social rank crowd the composition, providing a visual catalogue of urban transport at a moment of explosive change. Yoshitora was one of the principal designers of Meiji modernization prints in the late 1860s and early 1870s, and works like this triptych were eagerly bought by Tokyo residents as records of the new technologies transforming their daily lives. The print belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago's extensive holdings of Yoshitora's Yokohama-e and Meiji prints, assembled through the gift of Emily Crane Chadbourne in 1926.