Asakusa (浅草)

Asakusa is a district in northeastern Tokyo, on the western bank of the Sumida River within present-day Taito Ward, organized around the great Buddhist temple of Senso-ji and its principal deity Kannon. The temple, whose foundation legend dating to 628 tells of two fishermen brothers, the Hinokuma brothers, finding a small golden image of Kannon in their nets in the Sumida River, was the most popular pilgrimage destination in Edo throughout the Tokugawa period, drawing constant traffic of worshippers, vendors, and entertainers, and it served as the cultic anchor of an extensive entertainment quarter that developed around its precincts. By the late Edo period Asakusa contained the largest concentration of theaters, teahouses, archery galleries, storytellers, peep-show booths, kabuki performance halls, and street performers in the city, with the Yoshiwara licensed pleasure quarter situated approximately two kilometers to the north along the Nihon-zutsumi embankment and reached by the riverboat services from Asakusa quay. The district was destroyed in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and again in the firebombing of 1945, and its present form is largely a postwar reconstruction, though the temple compound preserves the historical plan with the great Kaminarimon thunder gate hung with its giant red paper lantern, the Nakamise vendor street running 250 meters north from the gate, the inner Hozomon gate, the five-story pagoda on the west side, and the main hall facing south, all rebuilt in the late 1950s and 1960s in faithful reproduction of the destroyed Edo-period predecessors. For Japanese printmaking, Asakusa figures throughout the meisho-e tradition. Utagawa Hiroshige treated Asakusa repeatedly in his Famous Places in the Eastern Capital and again in One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei, 1856-1858), including the celebrated winter sheet Kinryuzan Temple at Asakusa, in which the great paper lantern of the Kaminarimon is seen from inside the gate against a snow-blanketed approach to the inner temple, and other Asakusa sheets treating the festival of Sanja Matsuri, the Sumida-side dock, the Yoshiwara approach, and the surrounding entertainment quarter. Hokusai included Asakusa in his Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji in compositions in which the distant peak is glimpsed across the temple precinct, and Utagawa Kunisada and Kuniyoshi produced theatrical and bijin sheets set in the surrounding entertainment district. The Meiji-period kaika-e of Kobayashi Kiyochika and Inoue Yasuji recorded the district's transformation under gas lamps and modernized architecture, with Kiyochika's celebrated Asakusa night views figuring as some of the finest examples of his kosenga (light-ray pictures) atmospheric practice. The shin-hanga revival returned to Asakusa repeatedly in the work of Kawase Hasui, Tsuchiya Koitsu, Ito Shinsui, and Yoshida Hiroshi, with snow, rain, and night views of the Kaminarimon and the inner precincts forming a recurrent motif, including Hasui's celebrated Snow at Kinryuzan, Asakusa and Koitsu's evening views of the same gate. Yokoyama Taikan and other Nihonga painters of the early twentieth century treated Asakusa in painting traditions that fed back into print idioms. The visual character of Asakusa in prints centers on the great red gate with its massive paper lantern, the crowded Nakamise approach, the five-story pagoda, the temple roofs against the sky, the figures of pilgrims and entertainers, and seasonal phenomena ranging from cherry blossoms and the Sanja festival to fireworks over the nearby Sumida and snowfall on the gate and pagoda. Contemporary visitors find Senso-ji and its approach among the most heavily visited temple complexes in Japan, reached most directly via the Asakusa Line to Asakusa Station, the Tokyo Metro Ginza Line, or the Tobu Skytree Line, and the surrounding district preserves traces of the older entertainment quarter in its remaining theaters, restaurants, and shotengai, with the new Tokyo Skytree visible across the Sumida providing the principal contemporary skyline counterpoint to the temple silhouette.

Hanga catalogues 36 prints depicting Asakusa (浅草), by 18 different artists.

Hiratsuka Un'ichi, Inoue Yasuji, and Ishii Hakutei are among the 18 artists who depicted Asakusa in our collection.