Hiroshige and the Post Towns: The Prints on This Site

Utagawa Hiroshige never walked most of the Tōkaidō — but his Fifty-three Stations made the post towns immortal.

In the early 1830s the artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) travelled the Tōkaidō in the retinue of a shogunal procession carrying horses to the imperial court in Kyoto. The journey became the most famous series in Japanese art: The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, published by Hōeidō from 1833. Each post town received a single landscape print — travellers in the rain at Shōno, the great pine avenue at Hodogaya, snow falling on Kameyama — and the series was a publishing sensation.

Hiroshige's genius was to make the road itself the subject. Earlier artists had drawn famous places; he drew the experience of the journey — weather, fatigue, ferry crossings, tea-house rests. The prints sold to a public that mostly travelled the road in its imagination, and they fixed the image of each post town for two centuries. When you picture a shukuba today, you are usually picturing Hiroshige.

A few years later Hiroshige turned to the mountain road. The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kiso Kaidō (1835–38) covers the Nakasendō's stations; the early designs are by Keisai Eisen and the later ones by Hiroshige. Together the two series illustrate 122 of the 214 post towns in this guide — and this site uses the prints as the hero image wherever a station has one.

Why the prints are free to use

Hiroshige died in 1858, and his works are in the public domain. The images here are the scans held by Wikimedia Commons, credited on every page with their source file. They belong to everyone — as, in a sense, Hiroshige intended when he sold them by the hundreds to the travelling public of Edo.