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42. Sadashige Utagawa (Kuniteru) (1808-76)
Floats and Portable Shrines of the Kanda Festival in Edo / Chars et ch�sses portables au festival Kanda a Edo Woodblock print
OPPOSITE
43 Kuniyoshi Utagawa
(1798-1861)
Oribe Yasubei Taketsune Series: Stories of the True Loyalty of the Faithful Retainers, the Forty-seven Ron in Woodblock print
Poets and artists were fond of making outings throughout the countryside to write and sketch their thoughts and impressions. As a result, many Japanese became quite knowledgeable about their culture and geography. Woodblock illustrations often show people dressed in their finest clothing, dancing and picnicking around the cherry trees. In the countryside scenes, peasant farmers are often depicted planting or harvesting their rice crops, and transporting their goods to local markets. Urban landscape and cityscape prints showed people engaged in all sorts of trades and professions, often in tightly packed row-houses, stores, workshops, bookstalls, teahouses and inns of various qualities. Because preparing food was time consuming, many urban residents during the Edo period developed the habit of dining out, and prints often illustrate clusters of small restaurants, food stalls and tea houses offering entertainment. In addition, jostling and scurrying masses of people, as well as parades, fireworks, ferries and pleasure boats can be seen in visually rich cityscape prints. Parades of portable shrines (mikoshi) and floats were often depicted. At Ryogoku Bridge in Edo city, fireworks were frequently set off in the evening to coincide with sumo wrestling tournaments. [61, 86] The bakufu often paid part of the cost of the festivities to keep up the spirits of the townspeople and to give them a break from the drudgery and hard work of their difficult lives. Sumo wrestling became a very popular spectator sport during the Edo period, and printmakers were quick to capitalize on these giant men in their loin cloths as subject material, creating single portraits and depicting group competitions, and even showing them strolling in public areas. The rules of sumo wrestling were simple: Two opponents faced each other in a ring (dohyo), tossed salt to purify it, crouched down with fists on the ground and then charged each other. The first man pushed to the ground or outside the ring lost.
In places along Edo city�s Sumida River, print artists depicted lines of restaurants, people strolling along the river banks and, for those who could afford it, pleasure boats (yakatabune) on which several people could enjoy food and sake; the more expensive ones provided the company of courtesans. The Sumida River was often portrayed as a very crowded thoroughfare with ferries and cargo ships of all sizes transporting commodities like fish, lumber, charcoal, grains, vegetables, silk and cotton, and to remove the citys night-soil to the countryside. Illustrations of the city of Edo also show that its streets were divided into wards marked by gates and guardhouses that prevented entry into the wards late at night. Punctuated throughout the city were towers that functioned as fire lookouts. The row-houses had many communal facilities, like underground aqueducts and toilet sewer ducts, which made Edo one of the cleanest cities in the world for the period.
The last major category of ukiyo-e was the historical or legendary print. Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861) brought historical prints to their zenith, ushering in a period of unprecedented popularity. One of the immensely popular historical stories
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