Some pictures make you want to travel.
Looking at Utagawa Hiroshige’s Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, that feeling arrives quietly but persistently. A road blurred by rain, a post town at dusk, a mountain pass under snow — each print stirs a gentle restlessness, a wish to be somewhere else.
Hiroshige stands alongside Hokusai as one of the great masters of ukiyo-e. But where Hokusai’s world is bold and dramatic, Hiroshige’s is quiet and lyrical — a completely different sensibility.
1. What Was the Tōkaidō?
During the Edo period, the Tōkaidō was Japan’s main road, connecting the capital Edo — present-day Tokyo — with the ancient imperial city of Kyoto. Running roughly 500 kilometers along the Pacific coast, the road passed through 53 post towns, each a place to rest, eat, and resupply.
It was the country’s busiest highway: daimyo processions, merchants, pilgrims, and ordinary travelers all shared the same road. For most people, making the journey was the undertaking of a lifetime. Each post town had its own character, its own food, its own way of receiving travelers — and those who walked the road carried the feeling of each place in their bodies.
Hiroshige put that journey into prints, and passed it on to everyone who came after.
2. Did Hiroshige Actually Travel the Road?
Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) began work on Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō in 1832, when he was thirty-five. One account holds that he traveled the road himself as part of an official shogunate procession, sketching what he saw along the way. Another suggests he never made the trip at all, and based the series instead on illustrations by other artists — working from existing images rather than direct observation. How the series actually came to be is a matter of some debate, and one I’d like to dig into properly in a future piece.
Whatever the circumstances, the series was published by the house of Hōeidō, running from Nihonbashi bridge in Edo at the start to Sanjō bridge in Kyoto at the finish — 55 prints in all.
It was an immediate sensation. Hiroshige’s name spread across Edo almost overnight.
3. The Atmosphere of the Journey
What makes Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō so lasting isn’t precise documentation of each location — it’s the feeling of being in that place at that moment. The atmosphere of the road, and the particular air of each town.
Shōno: Driving Rain
Travelers scramble through a bamboo grove as a sudden downpour hits from an angle. The diagonal lines of rain are among Hiroshige’s most recognizable techniques, and Van Gogh was so struck by this way of depicting rain that he painted his own oil copy of it.
Kamabara: Night Snow
A post town at midnight, blanketed in snow, perfectly still. White and black, nothing more. This print is the purest expression of Hiroshige’s “aesthetic of subtraction” — everything unnecessary removed.
Nihonbashi: Morning Scene
Early morning at the starting point of the road. A daimyo procession and a bustling fish market share the same frame. From here, the 53 stations begin.
4. Hiroshige and Hokusai: Two Different Ways of Seeing
Comparisons between Hokusai and Hiroshige are inevitable — they were contemporaries, and both transformed Japanese landscape art.
Hokusai’s landscapes are structural and dramatic: bold compositions, strong colors, images designed to stop you.
Hiroshige’s landscapes are lyrical and atmospheric: haze, rain, snow, evening light — the feeling of weather and time of day carries you into the scene. Looking long enough, you start to feel you might be walking that road yourself.
Neither is better. They simply approached the Japanese landscape through entirely different sensibilities. Knowing both opens up the full range of what ukiyo-e could do.
5. Beyond the Tōkaidō
Hiroshige’s work doesn’t begin and end with the Tōkaidō.
One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (1856–58) is a series of over 100 prints depicting the landmarks and seasons of Edo — a summer rainstorm on a bridge, a plum orchard in bloom, fireworks, a river in moonlight. Among them, Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge became one of the most famous prints in the world after Van Gogh made an oil copy of it.
Hiroshige continued working with extraordinary productivity into old age. He died of cholera in 1858 at sixty-one.
6. Following Hiroshige’s Road
Parts of the old Tōkaidō still survive today — stretches of pine-lined road facing the Pacific, ancient teahouses on mountain passes, post towns that haven’t entirely forgotten what they were. It’s possible to walk sections of the route and compare what you see with what Hiroshige drew.
One place deserves special mention: Chojiya, a restaurant in Shizuoka City that has been serving tororo (grated mountain yam) since the Edo period. It sits in Mariko-juku — one of the 53 post towns, and one that Hiroshige actually depicted in the series. On the walls of the dining room hang reproductions of Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, and you can look at them while you eat.
To sit in a place that appears in the very prints on the walls — there aren’t many ways to get closer to Hiroshige’s world than that. If you find yourself passing through Shizuoka, it’s worth stopping.
A Final Thought
Hiroshige’s prints are both a record of a journey and a portrait of the desire to travel.
Whether or not people had walked the Tōkaidō themselves, holding one of Hiroshige’s prints gave them the feeling of having been there. That’s a kind of power that belongs to very few works.
Almost two hundred years on, Hiroshige’s rain is still falling.
References
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Hiroshige collection — metmuseum.org
- The British Museum, Hiroshige collection — britishmuseum.org
- Henry D. Smith II & Amy G. Poster, Hiroshige: One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, Braziller, 1986
- Andreas Marks, Japanese Woodblock Prints: Artists, Publishers and Masterworks, Tuttle Publishing, 2010
Image Credit
- Cover image: Utagawa Hiroshige, Nihonbashi: Morning Scene, from Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, 1833 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
