Utagawa Hiroshige II (二代目歌川広重) (artist 1826 – 1869)
True View of Tateyama in Etchū (Etchū Tateyama shinkei - 越中立山真景) from the series One Hundred Views of Famous Places in the Provinces (Shokoku meisho hyakkei - 諸国名所百景)
09/1859
9.5 in x 14.25 in (Overall dimensions) Japanese woodblock print
Signed: Hiroshige ga (広重画)
Publisher: Uoya Eikichi
(Marks 442 - seal 24-008)
Combined date and censor seal: 9/1859 and aratame
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
British Museum
Edo-Tokyo Museum
National Diet Library
Google map - Tateyama is seen in the right-center
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - a similar, but horizontal, print of this scene by Hiroshige I from 1858
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - An 1834 horizontal landscape by Hokkei of this same scene Valley of Hell or Jigoku-dani (地獄谷) at Tateyama was thought to be an earthly entry place into the underworld
"...in medieval times, the high mountain Tateyama in Etchū, also with pre-Buddhist associations with the other world, became strongly associated with an entrance to hell. Several medieval collections of tales containing stories of this place. They relate how a priest, climbing the mountain or dwelling in ascetic seclusion on its slopes, met a girl who told him that she had emerged momentarily from the hell that lay inside. She recounted her torments there and begged him to recite requiem sutra to shorten her time. Or again, travellers on the mountain heard cries from beneath the earth. They were the wails of the damned in the hell below."
Quoted from: The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan by Carmen Blacker, p. 83.
The sulphur springs of Tateyama helped advance the belief that this was the way to hell. (Ibid., p. 159)
"Since the Heian period this mountain's peak was considered a liminal area where people believed it possible to meet with the dead. Mt. Tateyama was regarded as one of the three most sacred mountains in the country together with Mt. Fuji of Suruga province and Mt. Hakusan of Kaga. Its volcanic activity with sulphuric acid and boiling water gushing out of the earth unleashed the fantasy of the Japanese who came to associate Mt. Tateyama with the sixth and last path of the rokudō: hell. After all it was only natural to explain the reddish color of the mountain's water as pools of human blood." The author also notes that Mt. Tateyama was a real moneymaker for the monks who practiced there and for the temples at the base of the mountain.
Source and quote from: Representations of Power: The Literary Politics of Medieval Japan by Michael F. Marra, p. 85.
At the beginning of the Nō play Utō or "Bird of Sorrow" by Seami Motokiyo a monk journeys to the top of Tateyama and declares: "But lo! upon arriving here on Tateyama, my eyes do indeed behold a living Hell. And the heart of even the boldest man must quail before this fell sight, more frightful even than demons and fiends. Here the countless mountain trails, grim and precipitous, split asunder as if to lead down into the Realm of Ravenous Ghosts, and down into the Realm of Bestiality." The view alone reminds the monk of his previous transgressions and he cries the tears of a penitent.
Source and quote from: Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century edited by Donald Keene, p. 272.
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Two yamabushi (山伏) traveling along a high, mountainous road.
This print is by Hiroshige II. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston refers to this publisher as Uoya Eikichi. Marks says it should be Sakanaya Eikichi.
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Listed in Hiroshige's Woodblock Prints: A Guide by Edward F. Strange, p.193, #46. Correctly identified as being by Hiroshige II. This print is from a set of 75 images.
Sakanaya Eikichi (魚屋栄吉) (publisher)
landscape prints (fūkeiga 風景画) (genre)