Overview
From Paula Curtis Collection[1]: In 1921, eighteen members of the Tokyo Manga Association took a trip that followed the Tōkaidō Road, Japan’s historic eastern sea route, which linked the political capital of Tokyo (formerly known as Edo) to the cultural capital of Kyoto. Shortly thereafter, the artists produced the Manga Picture Scrolls, which are the focus of this StoryMap. The fifty-five watercolors featured in these scrolls represent the historic Tōkaidō’s fifty-three stations plus its starting and ending points at Tokyo’s Nihonbashi and Kyoto’s Sanjō Ōhashi respectively. Offering a vivid homage to the famous woodblock artist Utagawa Hiroshige, the scrolls feature the same fifty-five stations as Hiroshige’s groundbreaking “Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō” (Tōkaidō Gojūsan-tsugi), created almost a century earlier in the 1830s.
The interactive map allows viewers to follow the historic Tōkaidō Road, highlighting the location of each station and its respective watercolor in the manga scrolls. Captioned in each image is an English translation of the artist’s description of the image and a link to the present-day site of the former station via Google Maps.
- Institution/Author: Ann Marie L. Davis
- Period: Premodern
- Geographic Focus: Japan
- Access: Open Access
Digital Humanities Resources on East Asia by Dr. Paula R. Curtis ↩︎