Episode Details

Katsushika Hokusai's Great Wave hangs behind museum glass today, but in 19th-century Edo the same print sold for about the price of a bowl of soba noodles. This episode traces how ukiyo-e, the Japanese pictures of the floating world, grew out of a booming, 70-percent-male city of a million people where a wealthy but politically powerless merchant class poured its money into kabuki, courtesans, and cheap mass-produced images of both.

We follow the woodblock production line of publisher, artist, carver, and printer, the kento registration marks that kept a dozen color blocks aligned by hand, and the genres that sold: bijinga, actor prints, and shunga. Then come the Tempo reforms of the 1840s that banned actor and courtesan prints and forced the pivot to landscapes, Hokusai's Prussian blue skies, Hiroshige's rainy highway stations, the ten-month mystery of Sharaku, and how discarded prints used as packing material ignited Japonisme and reshaped Van Gogh, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

• Why Edo's demographics and four-class hierarchy created an entertainment-starved merchant subculture
• How the carving process destroyed the artist's original drawing to create the master block
• Why the Tokugawa shogunate tolerated explicit shunga but feared social mobility
• How Prussian blue and Western vanishing-point perspective changed Hokusai and Hiroshige's landscapes
• How the Meiji Restoration, photography, and aniline dyes ended the tradition just as Paris fell in love with it