David's Choice - Episode #11

good evening this is woodbout printmaker dave bo here up on the second floor of our building in asakusa tokyo i'm in the room that houses the bulk of our collection of old prints and books and it is from this collection of course that we are going to select some prints to look at today in an earlier episode of this david's choice series it would be about three years ago i think i tried a bit of an experiment instead of selecting a group of prints to feature i picked just one there was more than enough content in that single piece of paper to easily fill a complete presentation as you might surmise from seeing this today's approach is going to be a bit different now relax please i'm not about to try and work my way through this entire stack of many hundreds of wood block prints they do though all share a common theme we'll talk about that first and then i'll cherry pick some interesting examples from this pile to show you as some of you might have guessed by now from seeing this stack our theme is a road a highway the old tokaido the route that ran between edo old tokyo and the capital city of kyoto its heyday was during that period when japan was for the most part close to the outside world that was from the early 1600s to the mid 1800s this map shows the basic location of the route now the name tokaido translates roughly as eastern sea route and you can see why it ran along the eastern coast of the main island now the history of this road and its surrounding culture is hugely interesting and you could easily plan out and write a very entertaining and educational book about it but here today we're going to focus on just one particular aspect the depiction of scenes from the highway in woodblock prints of course here's the map again let's zoom in this time and we'll also add something else these white circles represent the locations of the officially designated post stations along the route there were 53 of these and they were spaced on average about 10 kilometers apart now as you might expect it was food lodgings stables for horses these were the kind of services available in these places travel on the road was pretty much all on foot almost none of it was paved and there were no wheeled vehicles used with the entire route being just over 500 kilometers in length a typical journey would thus have taken maybe about two weeks give or take now scenes of the tokaido were incredibly popular theme for woodbutt prince right up there with the the 47 ronin story as something absolutely iconic that everybody wanted to know about as one measure of just how popular the theme was the noted designer hiroshige whose work we are going to dig into now created not just one series of prints of the entire tokaido he produced nearly 30 such sets during his working career and we're talking 55 designs in a set that's no trivial design job just a minute it's the 53 stations of the tokaido but i said 55 prints they were adding one for the start and one for the terminus giving a full set of 55 scenes now the tokaido print set that we're going to focus on today is what is generally known as the hoydo set that's from the publisher's name it was hiroshige's first major stab at the theme and was created back in the early 1830s the story goes is that he had a chance to travel down the length of the road as part of a government delegation must have made many sketches along the way and then designed a set of prints for his publisher when he returned maybe we'll talk about that a little bit later now this was all happening in an era without photography of course and it is really interesting for us these days we're used to seeing perfect realism in our landscape views it's interesting to see how he balanced two very different requirements of this job you've got to show people who have never been there what a place looks like but you also want to try and communicate to them what it feels like to be there now give me a minute to clear some space here and open one of these boxes and let's dig in and have a look at this set of prints the prints i'm now going to show you are selected from a set we have here which was produced by the takamizawa company in the 1970s i think they were one of the main companies in the business of making uk reproductions in the middle of the 20th century here's the opener of every tokaido series a view of nihombashi the centrally located bridge in tokyo from which all road distances were measured it seems to be early morning and the men in the front are carrying baskets of fish the main city seafood market was here at nihabashi in those days coming over the bridge are the forerunners of a procession getting an early start on their trip down the tokaido this would be one of the regional leaders with his retinue heading out on the way back home after finishing one of his mandatory residences in the city that was perhaps an obvious way for hiroshige to start off the set with the procession setting out but although we do catch glimpses of groups like this again and again here and there along the way the prints aren't about such a retinue itself these are not selfies the viewers of the places and of the activities and events that made up a typical journey now that opening scene shows a very active and busy scene in the middle of edo but of course the road winds through different environments lots of open countryside steep mountain passes and many river crossings the mountainous areas provided the best opportunity for visual drama the route down the coast was blocked in two places by mountains that came right down to the sea and the road had to go up and over this print hakone is one of those places and honestly speaking i don't quite know what to think of it that bizarre mountain the peak in question komagatake actually looks like this photo but as i mentioned before hiroshige clearly felt that his job wasn't the looking it was the feeling look over here we see our chain of travelers making their way along what is at this point a narrow pathway at the bottom of a steep valley now i've walked through that same section of the old road more about that a bit later and i get the idea you're deep in the valley quite enclosed rock faces are towering on each side it must have been somewhat of a scary place in those days and then here when you come down the final hill to the lake under the open sky you can see fuji in the distance calm and peace again so hiroshike has caught both of those aspects of the hakone area in one design now there's something very interesting about this print from a craftsman's point of view there's a mistake in the carving look at this chunk of rock here it's completely white all the other rocks are included in the color palette used on this print yellow blue orange green etc but this particular place is blank this is an example of hori nuki a place that was overlooked when they were doing the color separations and it would have happened like this the key block of course is carved first based on hiroshike's drawing now once the key block is ready it's printed out on a bunch of sheets one for each color in the finished print now to show you how this works i've made some mock-ups here i didn't actually carve this i just quickly traced it but imagine that these are sheets printed from a freshly completed keyblock the part that has these outlines now the sheets are then filled in like you see me doing here not with the actual colors intended for the finished print but simply as a guide to show the carvers which areas were needed for each color block here i am doing a mock-up of the separation for the yellow block you can see how the designated zones match the yellow areas of the finished result here's another one this is for the bluish tone you can see it's the same kind of match up now sometimes these color zones overlapped look on the circled area here it's a kind of a dirty-ish yellow tone that little zone must have been carved on both the yellow block and the gray block resulting in a blended color when the printing was done now in the case of a very mixed up and confusing area like this mountain it's really easy to leave something out to have a place that doesn't appear on any of your separations and at printing time it does gets no color bare white i've done this myself more times than i want to admit anyway i'm certain there was no intention to create a snowy area here this is just an error plain and simple it would have been noticed by the printer doing the initial proofing and the publisher was then faced with a choice fix one of the color blocks have the carter insert a piece of wood and recarve that so that the area would be covered or just whatever and clearly he must have just shrugged and let it go through and then takamizawa making their reproduction more than 100 years later of course reproduced the mistake also have i now spoiled this print for you once you've seen this you can never unsee it okay let's move on too much papers here on my desk out in the open countryside there was less opportunity for the big picture like that and hiroshige closes in and brings us all the action into the center of a detail this is hiratsuka another station relatively near mount fuji and there it is tucked away in the background now it's really interesting for me that although that famous mountain completely dominates that entire section of the route hiroshige turin didn't try and make those designs all about that iconic mountain i can't help wondering if that is in some way connected with the fact that hawk size ultra famous set of mount fuji views this is the set that contains the red fuji and the great wave that was already famous even then and it had been published just a year before these tokaido prints were designed hokusai was the older and much more well established designer he would have been in his 70s at the time and hiroshige he's now still in his 30s he's the young up-and-comer i wonder if they ever met can you imagine that to talk designing and drink sake and stuff god to be a fly on the wall for that discussion anyway so here we are with the mountain relegated to the background overshadowed by this strange looking little hill now this hill is actually real we'll get to this a bit later but for now look at what hiroshi has done here in the middle of all this open space he's put all the action together in one tight club so shmuck together that we can't even see these things clearly let's zoom in this guy here is a dispatch runner hustling his way down the road to the next station now these guys carried government messages and the small goods down the highway from edo to kyoto in japanese they were called hikiaku which is literally winged feet they worked in relays of course and it seems that given optimal weather conditions and no flooded rivers or things like that a message could be delivered to the other end of the highway in maybe four days imagine asking what do you do for a living sir i'm a hinkaku i run a double marathon every day back and forth back and forth now what these two guys are doing is at first not so clear but once you have seen more of these prints it becomes obvious there's a long pole and a basket these give it away these men are palanquin bearers cargo bearers dead heading after doing a job we can see them in operation or another two similar men we can see them in operation in this print of mishima station two men carrying their customer along the route the basket of course hangs from the long pole i presume they had some kind of padding on their shoulders but look at this i can't help wondering why hiroshige placed this large straw hat in this unnatural position it hides that guy's face you can imagine maybe imagine hiroshike's quick sketching session that day he's sitting there and he's grabbing ideas from the traffic passing by this comes by and this guy he looks like a bit of a tough customer you can imagine him don't you dare take my picture this is an early morning scene and perhaps this guy is on his way home from from some place we don't know the clothing is also interesting here as i said it's chilly it's early morning and misty and most of the people are bundled up but our two cargo bearers don't seem to need much clothing i wonder why anyway let's move on let's move on to this because we could do this all day this one is really fun this is mariko one of the smaller less well-known stations hiroshige labeled it meibutsu chaya a famous goods tea house and the signs tell us that their specialty is todoro jiru that's a kind of a soupy slurpee rice dish made with mountain yams the two travelers outside they're busy slurping it down and toro rojiro has to be slurped down there's absolutely no other way to eat it now i came across something very interesting while trying to learn more about the food being eaten here this restaurant the sign out front has their name here choji it still exists here's a photo the current generation says he is the 14th generation there and they have a very informative website in english i'll put a link for this to the description in the video on that site they have a page of instructions on how to eat toro rojiro and indeed they specifically talk about how much you have to make as noise as possible while slurping in order to bring out the best flavor you're not going to get any demonstration from me on that i grew up at a british sort of oh my god if my mother sees this never never anyway anyway we go indoors for the next one this is akasaka don't confuse this with asakusa this is where our print shop is located this is akasaka red hill now when you're in is mostly made of shoji screens it's kind of easy to create a cutaway view and that's what hiroshige has given us here our traveler on the left is clearly returning from the bath just in time for dinner to be served dinner is so course in an inn like this they're always served in the room now the man here next to the waitress lady is a masseuse and this was a profession commonly taken up by the blind back in those days i don't think he would normally come at the same time as the dinner service but hiroshige has kind of time compressed the scene here in order to fit everything in actually that's certainly so because over on the right here in a back room we see two meshimori onda preparing for their evening's work getting their makeup ready that term literally means meal serving woman but the services they provided would be needed sometime after dinner is over we're told that in order to maintain some kind of control of the public morals government regulations restricted each in to having no more than two such ladies on duty at any given time and before we leave this one hiroshige must have been a fun guy i think you know he left an easter egg in this print see the tenugue tao up on the rack here it's decorated with hiroshige's seal one that he used on any number of his famous prince where to next there are 55 prints in this set we can't go through them all but there is one topic here that i really don't want to skip i want to look at some of the river crossing scenes now as everybody knows from looking at the maps japan is a long and thin country it has a mountainous spine dropping away to the sea on each side this means the country has no long unwinding you know mississippi or amazon type rivers the water comes down off the mountains and for the most part straight out the sea now some of the rivers that interrupt the tokaido were quite deep and strong those were crossed by a collection of small ferries they're wide flattish boats that shuttle back and forth across the river like the one we see here for crossing the tama river near the beginning of the journey but most of the rivers along the route were not like this in the days before embankments were built rivers opening out the sea were wide frequently braided and quite shallow and six of the views in hiroshima's tokaido set show this type of river crossing where the only way to get across was to wade through it so a whole industry of what do you call them a river porters a whole industry grew up at each of these locations how did they get you across well how much were you willing to pay i don't have a priceless hand but we can see the different services that were on offer i've prepared a bunch of close-up detail shots here so that we can easily see what is going on piggyback here in the print of odawara we see some people getting taken across this way i can't help but imagine the signal can you imagine partway across the carrier steps on a slippery stone under the surface and over they go no charge for that one but also how would the customers mount up we see that happening here in the print of kanaya when i first saw this i thought these guys were having an impromptu sumo match but no it's just customers climbing on board another method was by ladder a ladder across the river i mean what here in another part of that same odawara scene we see a bunch of ladders scattered along the shore and this one here seems to be how they were used that would have been presumably in a somewhat more expensive way to get across because carrying one of these things takes four carriers but as you can see you can get two customers in one go you could also get across if you could afford it in your cargo one of those palanquins this is somewhat similar to the ladder system on a somewhat larger platform but there you are your own accommodation carried across the river here's a lady crossing at fuchu she never even had to leave her seat but for the head honcho in one of these processions who would never even be exposed to public view there was nothing for it but to go first class this is at kania and look at that crowd of carriers can you imagine all being inside that not even being allowed to peek out but the funnest one in this set is okutsu where the river is crossed right near the beach where it meets the ocean a couple of sumo wrestlers were heading down the highway presumably on their way to a regional tournament as we can see one of them got a horse but the other guy squeezed into a small cargo which is rigged up with a crossbar here on the mainberry pole and four guys are carrying it i think this guy behind is leading the poor little horse it's fun to imagine the scene at that the river there a few minutes before this the carriers must have been hanging around waiting for customers and then down the road these two guys come into view it's like sort of a quick junk quick game of rock paper scissors to decide who's gonna get this job okay while we are still inspecting some of these prints and before i move on to the next section of this presentation there's one thing i don't want to forget to show you as i mentioned the prints i've been showing you are taken from the set made by takamizawa around 1970 or so but this next one this is from a set published a couple of decades after that this is the print of kakegawa station and actually it's a little bit infamous because it can be considered to be somewhat influenced by a couple of windy designs from hawk sized 36 views of fuji which as i mentioned earlier was fresh on the market at this time now i don't quite understand how the vegetation is blowing this way while the wind is quite clearly going the other way but that's not what i want to talk about it's this look over here on the margin this publisher like to put the craftsman's names on the prince just like we here at moko hong kong do when there is room this inscription says hori carver ito susumu long time viewers of our youtube videos know these two men you met them in my remembering a carver video a few years back i actually have dozens of prints in our collection carved by itosan and i'm saving them for part three of that presentation now 190 years ago when this series of prints was produced how were the consumers of the day receiving them did they buy full sets just one or two what did they actually do with them we have very little knowledge of these things it's not a question of what class of people we know that for the most part woodbutt prints were aimed at the mass of townspeople the puzzle is mostly about what they did with these pieces of paper once they bought them in japan at that time there was absolutely no culture of framing pictures on the wall the upper class homes had a tokonoma an alcove in a formal room where scrolls would be displayed rotating on a seasonal basis the content would be painting or calligraphy those people would never dream of putting a wood block print up in such a location now wood-butt printed books we understand people could keep those anywhere on a shelf in a tan so or just stacked up here and there but the single prints are a puzzle were they displayed if so how there's a clue you know from a memory i have of a very early trip to japan it would have been 40 years ago and we were visiting the old country home where my japanese wife had grown up this was a farming family out in a quite isolated area they had no pictures on the walls and in truth there was really no wall space free for such things the shoji screens they had a buddhist altar there were a bunch of cupboards for bedding these things took up all the space but i remember an episode as we sat in the the kitchen area one day i saw my wife's older sister do something interesting she had received some kind of notice from the local agricultural association with some dates that needed to be remembered and she grabbed a couple of grains of cooked rice from the pot rub them between her fingers she's licking a little bit and she smeared the resulting paste on the top corners of that sheet and stuck it up on the wall next to the table where we sat some time later i guess when the events were over it would presumably have been just unceremoniously pulled down and tossed in the fireplace so that's the kind of environment these older prints were viewed in back in the day they were cheap casually picked up and totally disposable items for a person in a working class environment who would never in his life ever own such a thing as a painted scroll these would do just fine now when we move into a more modern period after the opening of japan things start to change and two things in particular affect our world of woodblock prints we have the emergence of a middle class the mass of people making up the bulk of society and they live in a more stable and generally more affluent state than back in the feudal era they are better educated they have better knowledge of their countries culture and history and the second major change here their living space has now been somewhat western influenced they have some furniture bookcases and they are familiar with the concept of pictures in that environment now all the print sets i have in our collection the one you saw stacked up at the beginning of this video they were created for that new society the message that was pouring in from the outside world that japanese ukyo was actually something special and deserving of attention was starting to get through and people educated people anyway were interested in seeing for themselves what all the fuss was about so many publishers jumped into the market and this provided an extremely important lifeline to the community of craftsman that still survived so around the beginning of the 20th century the focus completely changed instead of the creation of original work carving and printing yoshitoshi designs or okuchie prints from magazines whatever the main bread and butter for both publishers and craftsmen became reproduction work it was all the same to them i suppose the pattern of consumption was thus completely different instead of buying a couple of sheets from a bookshop or more commonly from a street peddler our suzuki-san would now order a set of these prints through an advertisement he might have seen in a weekly magazine or his newspaper and the prints were frequently marketed on a subscription basis to make them easy to buy now what we should do at this point i think is let's crack one of those sets open and have a look it's a bit too tight here to do that so i'm going to take one of those boxes downstairs where i have more room to actually spread it out and show you properly okay here we are downstairs in our currently sleeping asakusa shop we'll use the wide space here we're going to need it this is the takamizawa set from which i selected the prints that i showed you a few minutes ago this particular set is interesting for a few reasons it's still in the original shipping carton that's no big deal but this has a label that shows it was sent from the takamizawa address to a certain mr kikutakujiro back in showa 55 that would be 1980. when we get inside this is heavy we see the cloth covered case typical of mid-century reproduction sets opening it up we get a nice little surprise this set is signed by that same kikuta kojiro now that's not just some random name kikuta-san was a wood block carver he did a lot of work for the takamizawa company and is known to be the man who carved this set of prints or i should more accurately say his workshop is where this set was carved a massive project like this wouldn't have been the entire job of one man of course but of a workshop but only the head man's name goes on the finished product so we seem to have kikutesan's personal set but my friend the carver moto haru asaka trained there and he tells me that this project was done before he himself joined them he also deflated me a bit he said that the signature here doesn't indicate that this was kikuta-san's personal set just that it was sent to him first for signing before being then delivered to the actual customer when i received the set some years back i found this little takamizawa catalog included these are quite rare actually all the prints they had for sale at that time and it includes a price list and it's dated the same year 1980. this set of prints went for thousand yen at the time that was about twelve hundred dollars u.s but at today's rate it's more than double that it's about twenty five hundred dollars it also tells us that the set was available on a subscription basis we'll see how that works in a second here the prints are packaged once you get inside the prints are packaged in groups of four of these packages and subscribers receive one pack every month for 14 months for a payment of 20 000 yen each time anyway let's open one of these and have a look at some of the prints the groups of four are as you might expect in logical order with your journey beginning in old edo and proceeding down the road until we get to kyoto at the end each print is contained in a paper folder along with a bilingual explanatory sheet lots of japanese and a little bit of english it's okay no big deal thank you very much for this but right away we get to a major problem with these sets it's so difficult to look at the prints we've opened the main binder we've opened the group folder and now we've opened the paper folder and inner folder and we still can't see the print clearly now some of the 20th century publishers they glued their prints into these folders so that they would line up and some left them loose like this get this organized get this paper out of the way fold it up and now we can see the print we look at it for a minute and then back we go pack it up back in the folder try and find the next one open it up it's also crooked it's all very very very unwieldy now even i i'm a big fan of this stuff but i basically never look at sets like these it's so clumsy to browse them now the publishers of course knew this and some of them takamizawa was one such they provided an optional frame for each set these were easy open frames where the back opened up and you could simply put the paper folder into it with the print still in place the idea of course was a good one you would rotate the print on display always having a fresh one to enjoy nice in practice it just didn't happen these sets frequently come up on auctions these days both on open internet auctions and over in the wholesale interactions and far and away most of them are broken sets the frame of course is missing along with one of the prints and nine times out of ten it's the first print in the set that's missing they put that one up of course and never changed it and 50 odd years later that person has passed away someone's cleaning up the stuff and selling it and they don't know about the match-up between this box on the shelf somewhere and that picture in a frame over there i should add then that when we get these sets like this for the moca hong kong collection the first thing we do is remove the prints from this kind of packaging many of the publishers did not use acid-free paper for their packing material and it's common to find prints that are moldy or foxed we keep the packaging material in storage just for the record but the prints themselves are taken out and kept in a safer environment i slipped these two prints temporarily back in here this morning just for the purpose of making this video now another way that publishers tried to make a tokaido series more accessible both in price and in the ability to store it was of course by making prints smaller this tagamiza we said this takami is a difficult word this takami is our set we have been looking at here it's at or pretty close to the original dimensions but we have tokaido prints here in many different sizes here's a set from the yuyudo company as you can see it's slightly reduced in size the company bijutsu arts company they took it down even further this set it's an unknown publisher there's no markings on it they went down another stage and a number of companies made sets in postcard size now i'd like to look a bit closer to some of these but the light here is not so good let me take some of them back upstairs as i mentioned downstairs sets of the tokaido prints in hagaki size that's about postcard size were a common item in the post-war era we've got a number of them in our collection here at mokohanka we've got from un sodo in kyoto from takamizawa but it's this little one from the nihon hanga kenkyu-jo the japan print research institute quite an unknown place it's the one that is most worth showing these guys did a fabulous job making their tiny set it's very very tasteful work the gradations along the top the registration on all the tiny areas everything here holds its own in comparison with most full-size versions the designs haven't been simplified at all they're pretty much line for line dot for dot and smaller doesn't mean easier for the craftsman either carver or printer when the printable areas are as small as they are here it becomes very difficult to do them neatly and the gradations at the top are very difficult to pull off when i showed this set a while back to one of our printers upstairs she looked at me terrified is this what you're planning for next year's project i reassured her no no no she had nothing to worry about we weren't planning something like this right now although actually i think they could pull it off if we tried it and having a little set like this certainly solves that problem we talked about with the big box sets unpacking each print looking at it packing it up unpacking the next one but here though the problem is kind of reversed after a few minutes of looking at these we tend to start just flipping through without looking at them carefully what are you going to do though you know it's a set of 55 prints i don't know how much this sold for back in the day this would be in the 1960s i think but it must have been manageable because they seem to have made plenty of them these nice little sets do come on the market now and again there's another very interesting aspect of this little collection it is made in an accordion style but look what happens when you browse through it you start at the nihonbashi work your way down the road in order but when you get near the end of the book here you're only actually halfway down the road but of course at that point it just flips over you continue your journey working your way all the way back again until you get to kyoto at the end very clever so we've seen the incredible shrinking tokaido what about the other direction larger is that possible yes look at this this is double orban size this is the image of shono station and it's a great chance for me to mention something else about hiroshige's designs in far and away most japanese woodbutt prints of this era there's no sense at all of where the light is coming from there's no sunshine no shadows okieway prints are flat that was the medium clean outlines and flat colors but hiroshige and this was almost certainly under the influence of western art at this time was among the earliest designers to begin to incorporate things like inclement weather like this to try as i mentioned earlier to try and get us to feel what it was like to be there on that day here's another example from that same double o band set absolutely iconic this is kambara station now we're not sure at what time of year hiroshige made that trip down to hokkaido but as this is the only snow scene in the group the assumption is that it wasn't mid-winter and that he simply tried to add some variety but the story is more complicated there are researchers who doubt whether hiroshike actually did go on that trip along the tokaido their theory is that he went no more than a short distance down the road and for the rest of the locations used existing guidebooks and their illustrations as his rough source material he was pretty good at drawing obviously and given enough basic hints about the landscape in any particular place he could easily create the kind of imagery we have seen in this series and those researchers take this kambada print as their number one piece of evidence kambara station on the tokaido was near the coast it's in a part of the country with a very mild climate it's in what is now shizuoka prefecture that area is warmed by japan's equivalent of the gulf stream over in the atlantic here in the pacific it's the kuroshio current that keeps the climate along that coast very temperate even in winter and there are no deep mountains nearby kampara but there is another town in japan with the same name kambara and that one's up in the mountains of gumma prefecture and the suspicion is that when hiroshige was like doing his research for the set collecting images from here and there he took an illustration of that place as his inspiration i'm not going to take sides here i have no ability to read the old diaries etc but it certainly does seem suspicious as for this print it makes a beautiful beautiful effect at this large dimension but my god i for one would certainly not have wanted to be the printer on this job let's put these away safely now there's something else i absolutely want to show you today it's based on this this is the print of the chiju stage the place where there was a horse market in the old days this is the print from the set we have mostly featured today the postwar takamisawa set which for the most part is done quite nicely but i want to compare with one i have here from a set made back in the thai show era now i don't actually know who published this one there's absolutely no identifying information on the set itself but it is very tastefully made it's actually on a thick and heavy paper that was common in that era it might even have pulp in it it seems so soft now being about a hundred years old now it has become somewhat toned from age while the post-war copy is still only quite white it's about 50 years old the two publishers have quite different ideas about the actual coloration but what i want to look at is the carving just focus on one spot down in this corner the sweep of the wind blown grass it's quite nicely carved in the thai show version each line has a nice taste and sharp the later takami version the carver here has just sort of found it in the lines are just scratched out roughly now this were all we had we probably wouldn't complain it's a bunch of grass but once we see how much more carefully and tastefully those older guys did the job it's a bit sad so for me over the past few decades that i've been learning this craft both the carving and the printing it has been work like this from the thai show and earlier meiji periods that has been my guiding light i was never able to sit and watch any of those men carving i'm not that old but i can study their work both finished prints like these and things like this this is a wood block it's the key block for one of the designs in a set of tokaido prints this chidu design i showed this in one of the previous videos somewhere i think it was given to me about 40 years ago by sayakisan the owner of the yu dog publishing company they published tokaida reproductions and have done so for many years ever since the taisho area actually which is when this block dates from it's completely worn out it's cracked and split it's completely unusable so for him it was just waiting to be tossed out but he knew i was trying to learn about carving so he passed it over to me so that i would have it available for study what could a young carver learn from such an old and worn out block plenty oh my god when you look at it closely you can see things like the the angle that the carver must have held his knife for each cut and these angles are different on each and many of the lines you can figure out that he almost certainly didn't rotate the block while working but placed it firmly on his bench and used his wrist and hand to manipulate the knife over the lines now for those guys time was of the essence to be considered a slow worker was a real insult not to mention that you would get less accomplished and less earn less each time you stop and rotate the block and find your position again you lose cutting time and it all adds up but i think i'm getting a bit sidetracked here this video presentation is supposed to be about hiroshige's print series let's get back on track there's another topic that always comes up whenever i'm discussing these tall guido prints with people and i've had this presented to me any number of times dave i have a killer idea for you go back down the old tokaido route hunt around and find the locations shown in the old prince and do a new set showing the modern landscapes now the financial aspects of trying to make a set of 55 prints are one challenge but that's actually not the main barrier to this idea during the years of japan's industrialization the landscape changed just so much that the locations simply don't exist anymore and we aren't helped by the fact that as we have seen a number of hiroshiki's designs are pretty much imaginary in the first place but trying to find those locations is a killer idea and many people have had a go at it i have some such material and it is great fun i've got a book here dating from taisho 7 that's 1918 that compared the original prints with contemporary photographs photographs taken in 1918 and for some of the locations we can clearly see similarities with the hiroshiki design mostly for the ones closer to tokyo here's a small river crossing in hodogaya near what is now yokohama the river the bridge the row of buildings extending off into the distance i can believe this is the same place and the very next one totska a bridge again the junction of the two roads the building it all matches up perfectly with and by the way that junction is the beginning of the route down to kamakura and it's actually sign posted in the hiroshige print the hiratsuka design that we saw earlier and now we can see that there is indeed a little rounded mountain there hiroshige slightly exaggerated its height but i think that's acceptable artistic license when we move to mishima no doubt about it all about this it's the same shrine gate and lantern still there as in hiroshige's time moving well down the road now to goyu station excuse me get the book here no telephone pole in hiroshike's version but other than that i can believe this is the same street and then over to the horse market in chido station there's something really fun about this one could that be the same tree this photo was taken 86 years after hiroshike's time what do you think i don't know now when we move forward another 50 years from this it gets more difficult i have a set of photos that was included together with the tokaido set published by the yuyudo company in the late 1960s at hiratsuka well yes the mountain is still there at mishima they wouldn't take down the shrine but they have taken down the lanterns mariko station it got bypassed by the modern highway but as we have heard a shop selling the same torojiru soup still stands there in front of the same tall mountain and over down the road there at goyu station nothing much has changed at all except there are a few more telephone poles well what about today now i don't have the time to jump in a car and head out location hunting but we do have google street view what can we find hiratsuka bingo they haven't managed to dig up and carry away that little round mountain the road is a bit wider now but it's clearly the same place moving down the road to mishima we find that as expected the shrine gate is still there and this one too is very recognizable we didn't see the print before but this is the view from satta pass near uwe station if we crop the google view a bit we can clearly see that hiroshige must have stood on pretty much exactly this same spot when he came by 188 years ago down at goyu there's a few scattered buildings still left but most of them are gone that's pretty much the kind of thing we see geographical features are still there but all the townscapes are altered beyond recognition there is though one very special place on the old hokkaido that remains almost completely unaltered from the old days and i have a story my partner and i we were in the hakone area for a few days break from our work in tokyo i think we were over there for three days perhaps four she had made reservations for us at a couple of different places to stay the first one was higher up the mountain near the cable car but the next one was down deep in the valley near hakone yumoto when we arrived at that one in the late afternoon and were being shown to our room she behaved a little bit strangely she had this sort of i know something you don't know kind of expression we got our bags unpacked sat back to relax but she couldn't sit still she couldn't resist showing me the surprise that she had arranged this was a very large hotel 11 or 12 stories i think but our room which she especially reserved for us was on the ground floor at the back it was actually a kind of a suite with a couple of rooms including one for holding a tea ceremony and we weren't planning to use that room but beside it there was a door opening out onto a little enclosed garden there was footwear prepared of course this we went outside to look around now this is right deep in the valley as i mentioned before with mountain slopes rising on each side and we can hear the sound of a small stream running nearby there was a little wooden gate at one side of the garden with an unobtrusive sign the old tokaido road i stepped out and there i was standing on the rough stone pavement of the old road itself now i mentioned earlier that the tokaida wasn't the paved road but in the late 1680s or so 300 and some 40 years ago the roughly 10 kilometer section through these mountains was fitted with flatish stones to help make it more passable when the modern era came along the newer roads bypassed the steep valley it was left alone and it is now possible to walk along this completely undisturbed section of the tokaido from hakone yumoto up over a pass down to lake ashi where there is even a section preserved with the giant old cedar trees bordering it and she had thought i would get a kick out of this and she was right i could pretty much think of nothing else all evening after dinner as we relaxed there in our room you know what i was thinking right there just like footsteps from where we sat think of all the people who walked by right there tokugawa of course all the daimyo with their retinues back and forth and hiroshige too the hakone scene in his most famous set was situated at the western end of this stone pavement section where it drops down to meet lake ashi i went out there again in the twilight to stroll a bit you know i don't believe a ghost or anything like this you know of course what's gone what's gone is gone but i tell you it certainly felt special to be standing there it made that history much more real to me we hear these old names you know hiroshige they're just names that people made up right real people is there a difference just kind of all blends together over time but that night i felt the palpable reality of the old road standing on those stones i felt something about the people who walked along it and who lived and worked there three itinerant musicians just throw your instrument over your shoulder and head off down the highway the exuberance of being literally on top of the world villagers crouching down in preparation for a daimyo procession to pass they must have got pretty tired of that sort of thing but you don't dare lift up your head a traveler warming his backside by a fire on a chilly day and what's that other guy the one with his back to us what's he doing protecting his face and warming his front side and this woman with her child we met her earlier this is the great great great grandmother of shiba yamasan the current owner of that tea house these people existed and because hiroshiki left us such a wonderful record of this place and time they will live forever power of a brush thank you very much for coming along with me on this little journey tonight i hope you have enjoyed it see you next time and bye for now you

Channel: David Bull

Views: 397,191

Rating: 4.8882833 out of 5

Keywords: Japanese printmaking, Japanese prints, ukiyo-e, woodblock print, woodblock printmaking, hiroshige, tokaido

Id: GKoxt9Y2oMQ

Length: 52min 30sec (3150 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/EpicPizzaDude]

PINKERTON PINKERTON!!!

[u/mud_tug]

This was amazing. David just loves showing wood prints, even if they are not his own work.

[u/CMFETCU]

The man didn’t say “uhm” or use a filler word once in the whole first monologue that was without a film cut.

Truly a masterful presenter as well as master of his craft.

[u/Crannynoko]

This guy is great, he even streams on twitch!

[u/2_09]

WEEEEEEEEZERRRRRRRRRR

[u/Moeparker]

I have some of his Yokai prints, they are really cool.

[u/shinkieker]

This was a wonderful art and history lesson sprinkled with all sorts of interesting Japanese historical facts. Very much worth a watch!

[u/thnk_more]

That was beautiful. So nice to see that art and people like this exist. So different from what I know. This is the real beauty of Reddit

[u/ThatDarnScat]

David is the ultimate weeabo, and a master of his craft!