View of Ushijima and the Sumida River at Asakusa in the Eastern Captial from the Entrance to the San'ya Canal

Catalogued in the [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org archive under Watanabe Seitei (1851-1918), this print depicts a view across Ushijima and the Sumida River at Asakusa from the mouth of the San'ya Canal, a stretch of Edo's geography rich with literary, commercial, and devotional associations. The Sumida River was the great organizing presence of Edo, lined with willows, ferries, teahouses, and shrines, and the entrance to the San'ya Canal led northwest into the Yoshiwara pleasure district and beyond. Edo-period ukiyo-e designers from Hiroshige onward returned to these waterways repeatedly, and the Meiji and Taisho generations continued to find in them a way to celebrate the persistence of old Edo within the modernizing Tokyo. Seitei, trained in the Maruyama-Shijo lineage under Kikuchi Yosai, is celebrated above all as a Meiji [kacho-e](/glossary/kacho-e) master and as a key modernizer of Nihonga, whose softly toned bird-and-flower prints reached an unusually wide international audience. Topographic views grouped under his name in the ukiyo-e.org archive show how his style and his circle reached well beyond bird-and-flower subjects into the [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) tradition. The image is preserved through ukiyo-e.org's federated catalogue of Japanese woodblock prints.