A superb collaborative effort translating the traditional scenes of the famous road into modern 20th century impressions. Each of the scenes is painted alternately by Otani Son’yu (1886-1939) and Iguchi Kashu (1880-1930) making for a subtle contrast and yet achieving surprisingly harmonious viewing experience. Iguchi, a professional painter from Kyoto and Otani’s teacher, had a long-standing friendship with Otani and the two decided to travel along the road from Kyoto to Tokyo in 1919 and collect their impressions in a series of sketches. However, in printing the scroll they reverted to the traditional arrangement of starting the journey from Nihonbashi and going west to Kyoto. The first scroll opens with three calligraphic prefaces by Otani Kozui (1876-1948, Son’yu’s elder brother and the abbot of Honganji Temple in Kyoto), Tomioka Tessai (1837-1924, a famous painter), and Hashimoto Dokuzan (1869-1838, a Zen monk and a student of Tessai).
The beautiful opening scene shows Nihonbashi bridge during the night, with cars and electrical trams rushing across and stone buildings of the Ginza in the background. This is followed by 54 scenes between Tokyo and Kyoto, exploring not only different landscapes and seasons but also a variety of weather and light conditions. Furthermore, the scroll is charming for documenting the rapid modernisation of Japan, with shipyards, air-planes, trains, and cars making their way into the otherwise rural atmosphere.
The publisher Nakamura Taikan decided to publish Sonyu and Kashu’s paintings in a limited edition - unfortunately we do not know the number of copies. The base of the painting (shita-e) is printed in collotype allowing for subtle calligraphic variations of black and grey. On top of that colour was added on individual sections with woodblock prints. The publisher hired a printer from Tokyo, Motohashi Sadajiro, to facilitate this laborious process which due to the nature of the essentially manual process meant that each scroll is slightly different. Only the finest mineral colours were used (including gold dust around the scene of Mt. Fuji) and the resulting colour scrolls give the extraordinary illusion of being hand-painted. All of this resulted in enormous production costs and inevitably the publisher went bankrupt over the project. The imprint at the end of the last scroll states that the set of scrolls was sold for Yen500, an enormous amount at the time and only a very small number off rich clients could or would have purchased a set.
An English-language piece of calligraphy at the end by the American anthropologist Frederick Starr (1858-1933) reads: “A great Highway is an Artery through which pulses the Life-blood of a Nation”, a statement that appears to be slightly at odds with the reality of the Tokaido during the 1920s. Starr appears to have been highly regarded in Japan and when he died in Tokyo in 1933 there were plans to have a monument erected in his honour.
