Page 266 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

fig. 2
Edo, early seventeenth
century, detail from a
pair of eight-panel screens,
3
121.5 * 502.6 (47 /4 x 198),
Idemitsu Museum of Arts, Tokyo

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Kiyomizudera vied for splendor with the gantries of Kyoto's original Kiyomizudera. The tutelary
shrine dedicated to the goddess Benten in Lake Biwa north of Kyoto (cats. 143,189) was replicated in
the middle of an artificial pond, Shinobazu (Edo's Lake Biwa), in the Ueno district (see cat. 188). Edo
was literally an artificially built environment, down to the man-made land reclaimed from the sea.
The new city had been occupied only a few decades before screens depicting its new famous
places began appearing in emulation of those of Kyoto (fig. 2). The right screen of a pair painted in
the first half of the seventeenth century shows Shinobazu Pond and the Benten Shrine, Eastern Mount
Hiei, Kan'eiji, and the outworks of Edo Castle. These became part of the standard official imagery
for the city.
Art has a willful way of exposing rents in the social fabric, and the images of Kyoto as a
Utopian ideal underwent transformations that underscore the changing conception of city life brought
on by the economic, demographic, and artistic complexification from the sixteenth to seventeenth
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centuries. By the early seventeenth century the same city is invested with a more raucous character.
Amusements along the Riverside at Shijó (cat. 231) focuses exclusively on the licentious or entertainment

aspects of this dignified ancient capital. Such images of Kyoto's famous pleasure district were echoed
in depictions of the burgeoning theater and brothel districts of Edo (see cats. 238, 239, 241, 280, 281).
The difference lies in the vision of the artist, now no longer a member of the aristocratic elite, but a
freelancing "town painter" (machi eshi) whose view from below, so to speak, was added to the compo-
site visual urban discourse.
Images of Edo quickly followed suit. A factor responsible for the representation of the city as a
playground lay in the rapid rise, during the eighteenth century, of its printing industry, the chief purvey-
ors of images of the so-called floating world. Woodblock prints were the "Edo souvenir" par excellence,
bought by tourists and residents alike. In Shikitei Sanba's book Floating World Bathhouse (Ukiyoburo)
(1809 -1822) children declare matter-of-factly, "We always take Toyokuni prints as presents when we go
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to Kansai" (the Kyoto area). The officials of Edo were at a disadvantage in controlling the depictions
of their city that went out to the provinces.
Nonetheless, emphasis on the pleasure districts was displaced in the nineteenth century by a
more symphonic, measured urban portrait, first distributed through printed guidebooks, then modified,