Ukiyo-e

• 1. Introduction

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  Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art that flourished across three centuries, producing woodblock prints and paintings that would eventually reshape how artists on the other side of the world understood colour, composition, and the beauty of everyday life. The name translates as "pictures of the floating world" - and that phrase carries a deliberate double meaning. It describes the hedonistic merchant-class culture of Edo Japan, but it also echoes an older Buddhist term meaning "this world of sorrow and grief." A genre born from pleasure districts and popular entertainment somehow became one of the most influential art forms in global history.

  How did a commercial art form made for prosperous townspeople end up in the collections of Edgar Degas and Vincent van Gogh? How did prints sold for the price of a bowl of noodles come to reside in institutions holding over 100,000 pieces? And what explains the paradox of an art tradition that the Japanese themselves considered of little lasting value, yet which Westerners prized so highly they were accused of siphoning Japan of a national treasure? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Floating World's Origins

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  In 1603, Tokugawa Ieyasu, born in 1543, was appointed shogun with supreme power over Japan. He consolidated his government in the village of Edo, the settlement that would become modern Tokyo. His administration required the territorial lords to assemble there in alternate years with their entire entourages, and the resulting demand for labour drew workers from across the country. Males came to make up nearly seventy percent of Edo's population. The village, home to around 1,800 people at the start of the Edo period, grew to over a million by the 19th century.

  The Tokugawa shogunate placed merchants at the very bottom of a four-class social hierarchy, stripping them of the political power they had wielded during the civil wars of the previous century. But it could not strip them of the money they earned in a rapidly expanding economy. Newly prosperous merchants sought leisure in the pleasure districts - particularly Yoshiwara in Edo - and spent on artworks to decorate homes that, by law, had to remain modest in size.

  Writer Asai Ryoi captured the spirit of this class in his novel Ukiyo Monogatari, roughly dated to around 1661: "living only for the moment, savouring the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms, and the maple leaves, singing songs, drinking sake, and diverting oneself just in floating, unconcerned by the prospect of imminent poverty, buoyant and carefree, like a gourd carried along with the river current." That was the floating world. And ukiyo-e was its art.

• 3. Moronobu and the Print Revolution

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  Hishikawa Moronobu, born in 1618, produced the first ukiyo-e woodblock prints, and by 1672 his success was so considerable that he became the first of the book illustrators to sign his work. Woodblock printing itself was not new to Japan. The Hyakumantō Darani of 770 CE shows it had been practised for nearly a thousand years, though reserved almost entirely for Buddhist seals and images. What Moronobu changed was the scale and ambition of the medium, moving beyond book illustration to produce single-sheet images that could stand alone or be grouped into series.

  The division of labour in print production was essential to reaching a mass audience. The artist designed the print; a carver cut the woodblocks from cherry wood; a printer inked and pressed the blocks onto handmade paper; and a publisher financed, promoted, and distributed the finished work. This system allowed prints to be marketed at prices accessible to prosperous townspeople. By the mid-19th century, total circulation of a single print could run into the thousands.

  The system also came with a built-in marketing mechanism: series. From the second half of the 17th century, prints were frequently issued as part of named series, each stamped with the series title and its number. Collectors bought each new print to keep their sets complete, a commercial technique that proved durably successful. Hiroshige's Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō eventually ran to dozens of individual prints.

  Monorobu's Hishikawa school attracted followers and imitators. Torii Kiyonobu I focused on kabuki actors. Kaigetsudō Ando produced courtesans in such a stereotyped, instantly recognisable form that it lent itself to mass production - until Ando's exile following the Ejima-Ikushima scandal of 1714 abruptly ended the school.

• 4. The Colour Revolution

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  The earliest ukiyo-e prints were monochromatic. Colour was added by hand for special commissions, first with orange-tinted tan-e, then the pink beni-e of the 1720s, then urushi-e with its lacquer-like finish. In 1744, benizuri-e marked the first real success in colour printing, using separate woodblocks for each colour - beginning with beni pink and vegetable green.

  Okumura Masanobu, born in 1686, was a central figure during this period of rapid technical change. He established a print shop in 1707 and combined elements from multiple contemporary schools, belonging to none. Among his contributions were the introduction of geometrical perspective in the uki-e genre in the 1740s, and the long, narrow format of hashira-e prints.

  The shift to full colour came in the 1760s through the delicate, romantic prints of Suzuki Harunobu, born in 1725. His nishiki-e prints used up to a dozen separate blocks to handle different colours and half-tones, invoking the classicism of waka poetry and Yamato-e painting. These "brocade pictures" were named for their resemblance to imported Chinese Shuchiang brocades. Their success, from 1765 onward, caused demand for the limited palettes of benizuri-e and urushi-e to collapse almost entirely.

  The production technique behind these prints was physically demanding. Printers worked with blocks face up so they could vary pressure and watch as paper absorbed the water-based ink. Registration marks called kentō, placed on one corner and an adjacent side, kept multiple blocks aligned correctly. Effects unavailable to mechanical presses were possible by hand: embossing by pressing an uninked block against the paper, burnishing with agate to brighten colours, and dusting with metal or mica. The original design drawing was destroyed in the process of cutting the first block.

• 5. Masters of the Late Edo Period

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  A censorship law went into effect in 1790 requiring prints to bear a seal of approval before sale. By 1799, even preliminary drafts required censors' approval. Utamaro was imprisoned in 1804 for depicting the 16th-century leader Toyotomi Hideyoshi. A group of Utagawa school artists including Toyokuni had their works suppressed in 1801. The era's greatest masters worked under this tightening constraint.

  Utamaro, born around 1753, made his name in the 1790s with his bijin okubi-e, or "large-headed pictures of beautiful women," portraits focused on the head and upper torso. He experimented with line, colour, and printing techniques to bring out subtle differences in features, expressions, and class backgrounds. His individuated beauties stood in sharp contrast to the stereotyped images that had been standard. After the death of his patron Tsutaya Jūzaburō in 1797, his prodigious output declined in quality. He died in 1806.

  Sharaku appeared in 1794 and disappeared just as suddenly ten months later. His real identity remains unknown. He produced striking portraits of kabuki actors that emphasised the gap between actor and portrayed character, with expressive, contorted faces that contrasted sharply with the serene images typical of other masters. Published by Tsutaya, Sharaku's work found resistance, and by 1795 his output had ceased as mysteriously as it began.

  Eishi, born in 1756, abandoned his position as painter for the shogun Tokugawa Ieharu to take up ukiyo-e. Hokusai, self-described as the "mad painter" and born in 1760, had trained partly in the Miyagawa school and went on to a career spanning 70 years, during which he used over a hundred different names. His Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji included The Great Wave off Kanagawa, now among the most recognised works of Japanese art.

• 6. Landscape, Decline, and Hiroshige

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  The Tenpō Reforms of 1841-1843 sought to suppress outward displays of luxury, specifically prohibiting prints of courtesans and actors. Many artists turned to landscapes and nature - particularly birds and flowers, a genre known as kachō-e. Hokusai's detailed nature prints are credited with establishing kachō-e as an independent genre. His Hokusai Manga, running to 15 volumes, contained over 4,000 sketches of realistic and fantastic subjects.

  Hiroshige, born in 1797, is considered Hokusai's greatest rival. He specialised in serene landscapes where mist, rain, snow, and moonlight dominated the composition. His The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō was a cooperative project with Eisen. Hiroshige's followers, including adopted son Hiroshige II and son-in-law Hiroshige III, carried the style into the Meiji era.

  Kuniyoshi, born in 1797, tried his hand at historical warrior scenes, satirical works, and landscapes. His series depicting heroes from the Suikoden ran from 1827 to 1830; his Chūshingura series followed in 1847. That he could produce satirical scenes in the dictatorial atmosphere of the late shogunate period was itself taken as a sign of the shogunate's weakening grip.

  After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, ukiyo-e suffered a sharp fall. Woodblock printing turned its services to journalism. Photography competed for the same audience. Synthetic aniline dyes, arrived from the West in 1864, had already begun replacing traditional organic pigments; their harsher, brighter colours marked the late prints. Yoshitoshi, born in 1839, produced his One Hundred Aspects of the Moon between 1885 and 1892. Kiyochika, born in 1847, documented the introduction of railways and Japan's wars. By the 1890s, the tradition was moribund.

• 7. Japonisme and the West

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  Swedish naturalist Carl Peter Thunberg spent a year at the Dutch trading settlement of Dejima, near Nagasaki, and was among the earliest Westerners to collect Japanese prints. At the beginning of the 19th century, Dutch merchant-trader Isaac Titsingh's collection drew the attention of Parisian connoisseurs. Such prints had appeared in Paris from at least the 1830s, though reception was mixed; even when praised, ukiyo-e was generally considered inferior to Western works emphasising anatomical accuracy and naturalistic perspective.

  The Convention of Kanagawa in 1854, triggered by the arrival of American Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853, opened Japan to the outside world after more than two centuries of seclusion. Japanese art drew notice at the International Exhibition of 1867 in Paris, and became fashionable in France and England through the 1870s and 1880s. Art critic Philippe Burty coined the term Japonism. Siegfried Bing opened a Japanese goods store in 1875, published the magazine Artistic Japan in English, French, and German editions from 1888 to 1891, and curated an ukiyo-e exhibition at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1890 attended by artists including Mary Cassatt.

  The influence on Western artists was direct and documented. Manet's patterned wallpapers and rugs were inspired by patterned kimono in ukiyo-e pictures. 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. French composer Claude Debussy drew on the prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige for his La mer, completed in 1905. Poet Amy Lowell published her collection Pictures of the Floating World in 1919.

  Dealer Tadamasa Hayashi operated from Paris, and his Tokyo office exported ukiyo-e in such quantities that Japanese critics later accused him of siphoning off a national treasure. The drain went largely unnoticed at first in Japan, because Japanese artists were themselves immersing in classical Western painting techniques. American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was among those defrauded by forger Takamizawa Enji, born in 1870, who developed a method of recutting woodblocks, printing fresh colour on faded originals, and aging the result with tobacco ash. Wright brought 1,500 Takamizawa prints from Japan to the United States, some of which he had already sold before the truth emerged.

• 8. Revival and Legacy

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  Publisher Shōzaburō Watanabe introduced the term shin-hanga, meaning "new prints," in 1915 to describe a style aimed at foreign and upscale Japanese audiences. Goyō Hashiguchi was called the "Utamaro of the Taishō period" for his manner of depicting women. Hasui Kawase produced modern landscapes. Watanabe also published non-Japanese artists, including an early set of Indian- and Japanese-themed prints in 1916 by the English Charles W. Bartlett, born in 1860.

  Parallel to shin-hanga, the sōsaku-hanga movement demanded that a single artist design, carve, and print each work. Kanae Yamamoto, born in 1882, is credited with founding this approach. In 1904, as a student at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, he produced Fisherman using woodblock printing, a technique then considered old-fashioned by the Japanese art establishment. The Japanese Woodcut Artists' Association, founded in 1918, marked the movement's formal beginning. Works ranged from the entirely abstract prints of Kōshirō Onchi, born in 1891, to the traditional figurative scenes of Un'ichi Hiratsuka, born in 1895.

  The largest collection of ukiyo-e outside Japan - surpassing 100,000 items - resides in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, begun when Ernest Fenollosa donated his collection in 1912. The largest collection in Japan, also 100,000 pieces, is 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.

  Novelist Jun'ichirō Tanizaki offered a pointed critique of Western enthusiasm: ukiyo-e was, he maintained, merely the easiest form of Japanese art to understand through Western aesthetic values, and that Japanese of all social classes had long enjoyed it - but Confucian social mores kept them from discussing it openly, mores that the West's vocal celebration of the "discovery" blithely violated.