Talk:The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō

Other editions
It should be mentioned that there are many editions of Hiroshige's Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō besides the famous Hoeido edition. Have a look here for instance. bamse (talk) 06:59, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Most or all of these are completely different works, no? I notice the commonscat contains 131 images! Johnbod (talk) 15:37, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Sure they are different, albeit with the same title (Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō). Thats why I think the info belongs into this article. bamse (talk) 08:29, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Disputed inspiration
The notion that Hiroshige drew upon sketches made during an alleged 1832 journey to Kyoto, using them as direct inspiration for this celebrated series, a massive best-seller in its day (keep in mind, of course, that woodblock images were not at the time regarded as fine art but as ephemera, and most of the production was long ago discarded), is an apocryphal story first told by Hiroshige III sixty years later. While I realize more than a century of scholarship on Hiroshige has relied on this anecdote, it is incontestably, and demonstratively, clear that the (then) little-known artist, with the critical assistance and collaboration of his (unknown and utterly new at the time) publishing house, Hōeidō, itself a venture by the artist-collaborator Takenouchi Magohachi (1780/1-1854; active 1832-1840), drew primary inspiration for many if not not most of its designs from illustrations in a previous generation’s guide books, including Tōkaidō meisho zue (“Gathering of Views of Famous Sights along the Tōkaidō”), published in 1797. Before Hiroshige undertook the Fifty-Three Stations project for Hōeidō, Takenouchi Magohachi had illustrated the 1832 kyōka album Haikaika higagotoshū, which he signed (along with other books) with the pseudonym Bizan. His influence is so strong he could credibly be cited as a collaborator, which is (needless to say) not at all to dispute Hiroshige’s genius. But he did not, and could not, have produced this masterwork on his own.

This is not original research on my part; all that I write here can be multiply sourced to recent scholarly publications. But it is difficult to combat the mythology built up around Hiroshige, particularly the anecdotal accounts of heirs who never knew him, who supplied their biographical material to please the first wave of scholarly interest that came from North America and Europe in the late 19th C, and led to the export of what is estimated to be more than 90% of Ukiyo-e production (and perhaps even a higher perfentage of Hiroshige’s extant work, much of which was later purchased back by Japanese collectors, a trend which continues to this day). But it is significant, I think, to understand just how Hiroshige and his then-unknown publisher and friend, the erstwhile Bizan, pulled off an unprecedented publishing coup, producing the most massive “best seller” of their decade; they were clearly quite savvy both in recycling and improving upon existing imagery, marketing a vision that offered immediate, and fresh, appeal to the contemporary Japanese audience of the 1830s. I will try, if I can, to update this and other articles accordingly, but it is a bit of an heavy swim against the riptide of more than a century of received opinion, which has arguably put misplaced (Western?) emphasis on a particularly romantic notion of the series’ genesis while ignoring certain elemental aspects. Then again, of course, there’s the problem I always with such things, that the truth of the matter, the facts as they are and the manner in which they reveal hidden meanings throughout the series, perhaps only matter to me. [Sigh.] So bear with me, gentle readers, all three or four of you who are ever likely to read this Vesuvius Dogg (talk) 01:11, 21 February 2018 (UTC)