Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ukiyo-e translates as "pictures of the floating world." The term derives from ukiyo, which was homophonous with an ancient Buddhist word meaning "this world of sorrow and grief" but came to describe the hedonistic lifestyle of the merchant class in Edo-period Japan. Writer Asai Ryoi celebrated this spirit in his novel Ukiyo Monogatari, dated to around 1661.
Hishikawa Moronobu, born in 1618, produced the first ukiyo-e woodblock prints. By 1672, his success was such that he became the first book illustrator to sign his work. He also pioneered the single-sheet print that could stand alone rather than serving only as a book illustration.
Full-colour nishiki-e prints became standard in the mid-1760s through the work of Suzuki Harunobu, born in 1725, who used up to a dozen separate woodblocks to handle different colours and half-tones. Earlier milestones included the first colour printing with multiple blocks in 1744, using pink and green.
Ukiyo-e's flat colours, bold outlines, and asymmetrical compositions directly influenced artists including Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec from the 1860s onward. Van Gogh painted oil copies of prints by Hiroshige and Eisen. Toulouse-Lautrec signed work with his initials in a circle, imitating the seals on Japanese prints. The trend was called Japonisme, a term coined by art critic Philippe Burty.
Ukiyo-e went into steep decline after the deaths of Hokusai and Hiroshige and the Meiji Restoration of 1868. The rapid Westernization of the Meiji period saw woodblock printing redirected toward journalism, while photography competed for audiences. By the 1890s the tradition was widely considered moribund.
The largest collection outside Japan, surpassing 100,000 items, is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, begun when Ernest Fenollosa donated his collection in 1912. The largest collection in Japan is also 100,000 pieces, held by the Japan Ukiyo-e Museum in the city of Matsumoto. The British Museum began collecting in 1860 and by the late 20th century held 70,000 items.