Hiroshige's Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido: Rain, Snow and the Poetry of Travel

A road experienced through weather

A sudden shower lashes a steep road. Travellers bend forward, grasp their hats, and hurry through rain that seems to cut diagonally across the entire scene. In Shono, one of Utagawa Hiroshige's best-known Tokaido prints, weather becomes the event that connects people, vegetation, and landscape.

Hiroshige lived from 1797 to 1858. His famous Hoeido series of the Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido appeared in the early 1830s and includes fifty-five designs: the fifty-three stations, together with the route's starting and ending points. The road from Nihonbashi in Edo to Kyoto supplied a framework for remarkably varied scenes.

These prints are not simply records of famous places. Dawn, dusk, wind, mist, rain, and snow give each scene a particular atmosphere, while small human figures turn the landscape into an experience. The viewer can imagine the effort of climbing a slope or the relief of reaching a warm stopping place.

Hiroshige and Hokusai: different ways of seeing

Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai are often compared as the great landscape artists of ukiyo-e. Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji offers memorable geometric relationships and dramatic changes of scale. Hiroshige's Tokaido series frequently draws attention to weather, daily activity, and the emotional texture of a journey.

The distinction is useful, but it should not become a rigid opposition. Both artists were inventive composers, and both could combine powerful design with close attention to ordinary life. Their differences invite us to notice the particular decisions made within each print.

Hiroshige came from a family associated with Edo's firefighting service and studied under Utagawa Toyohiro. His eventual success in landscape printing depended not only on the artist but also on the skills of publishers, block cutters, and printers. Bokashi, the controlled gradation of colour, was especially effective in creating darkening skies, water, and atmospheric distance.

The shower at Shono and the snow at Kanbara

In Shono, a steep diagonal road gives the composition its urgency. Rain lines cross that structure, while dark bands of bamboo and bent human bodies suggest the force of the storm. The image communicates more than wet weather: it captures a brief disruption in the lives of people on the road.

Kanbara presents a different mood. Snow covers roofs and ground, and a few travellers move through a subdued night landscape. The pale surface and darkening sky create an impression of extraordinary quiet. Even without hearing anything, the viewer can imagine footsteps softened by snow.

The relationship between the imagined snow scene and the actual climate of Kanbara has long attracted discussion. That question reminds us that a landscape print is a constructed picture, not a photographic report. Selection, invention, and poetic effect all contribute to its truth as an artwork. Hiroshige makes the place memorable by giving it an atmosphere.

A print for the traveller and the stay-at-home reader

The series emerged within a lively culture of travel, pilgrimage, guidebooks, and commercial entertainment. Journeys to Ise and other sacred places offered important reasons to travel, while inns, tea shops, local foods, river crossings, and checkpoints shaped the experience along the way.

Hiroshige includes this human infrastructure of the road. Travellers pause for food, prepare to leave a station, cross difficult terrain, or encounter a procession. The images give space to work and inconvenience as well as beautiful views.

A buyer who had travelled could recognise a memory; someone preparing to depart could imagine the route ahead. For a person unable to make the journey, the series offered the pleasure of moving through distant places while remaining at home. Its popularity belongs to all of these forms of looking.

Beyond Japan

Japanese prints circulated widely in Europe in the later nineteenth century, becoming an important part of Japonisme. Hiroshige's dramatic framing, flat areas of colour, unusual viewpoints, and sensitivity to atmosphere offered artists a different visual language. Prussian blue also contributed to the striking appearance of many landscape prints.

Vincent van Gogh made painted interpretations of Hiroshige's bridge-in-the-rain and plum-garden designs from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Those works belong to a different series from the Tokaido, but they show how closely he studied Hiroshige's imagery. Claude Monet's collection of Japanese prints provides another important example of their reception.

The continuing appeal of the Tokaido series is more intimate than influence alone. Weather changes a place, and a place changes the mood of the traveller within it. Hiroshige makes that relationship visible through a few figures, a bend in the road, and a carefully printed sky.

References and Further Reading

The following Japanese-language references were supplied with the original article.

• 大久保純一『広重と浮世絵風景画』東京大学出版会、2007年
• 内田実『広重』岩波書店、1932年
• 小林忠『江戸浮世絵を読む』ちくま新書、2002年
• 太田記念美術館編『歌川広重 東海道五十三次』2017年
• 千野香織・辻惟雄『日本美術の現在・過去』平凡社、1996年

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