Utagawa Kunisada (歌川国貞) / Toyokuni III (三代豊国) (artist 1786 – 01/12/1865)

View of Okabe (Okabe no zu: 岡部之図) from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Road (Tōkaidō gojūsan tsugi no uchi: 東海道五十三次之内)

Print

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Date:ca 1838
Inscription:Signed: ōju Kunisada ga (応需国貞画)
Publisher: Sanoya Kihei
Censor's seal: kiwame
Links Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
National Diet Library
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - Hiroshige's Okabe: Utsu no yama (岡部　宇津の山)
Museum für angewandte Kunst, Vienna
Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art - they date their copy to 1836
Bryn Mawr
Honolulu Museum of Art
The Spencer Museum of Art
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Google maps - the Utsunoya-toge Pass with a Meiji Era tunnel to avoid the hazards of the old road
Fujisawa Ukiyo-e Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Description:All of the prints in this series are chūban sized. The example of this print in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is 10 3/16 x 7 5/16 in. This one in the Lyon Collection is fractionally smaller because it has been trimmed slightly at the top and along the right and left hand sides.

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In Hokusai and Hiroshige: Great Japanese Prints from the James A. Michener Collection, Honolulu Academy of Arts on page 185 it says: "About 4½ miles from Mariko, the topography changes drastically, and travelers again reach a treacherous place, the Utsu Pass - third in difficulty after the Hakone and Satta Passes."

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This is number 22 in the series. Curatorial notes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on one of Hiroshige's renditions of this stop say: "...the mountain pass at Okabe, the twenty-second station on the road in the mountains west of Suruga Bay..." This scene is reminiscent of "...an episode from Chapter 9 in the poetic classic Tales of Ise."

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In Tokaido Landscapes: The Path from Hiroshige to Contemporary Artists, 2011, #22, p. 34, speaking of the original Hiroshige print it says in a text by Sasaki Moritoshi: "The Utsunoya Pass was well known from an episode in the ancient Ise Monogatari (Tales of Ise); in the late Edo period, the Tōkaidō did not cross that exact spot but the entire area was known as Mount Utsu. A woodman carrying firewood appears at the top of the slope, followed by two men with baskets on their backs. From the rear to the foreground, the figures increase in size, until the lower half of the last figure is truncated, in conveying the sense of these people crossing the pass in succession."

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Utsunoya Pass is at 279 meters (about 915') and connects the villages of Mariko and Okabe.

Recently a friend asked me - today is September 28, 2024 - if it would be possible to reenact walking all of the stations of the Tōkaidō today. I said that I didn't believe so, for a number fo reasons. Since the time in which it was used the population has risen dramatically, transportation has been modernized, industrialization has taken place and much of Japan has had to be rebuilt after natural disasters and from the destruction of World War II. Some parts of the road aren't even accessible any more.

From the time of Hiroshige and Kunisada, when travelers had to trudge over the Utsunoya Pass, more modern means of saving time and effort have been implemented. In 1876 the Meiji Utsunoya Tunnel (宇津之谷トンネル) was opened. In 1997 it was registered as a national tangible cultural property. There may have originally been a toll for using it.

Today there must be a more modern and expansive tunnel because there is a 1973 print by Sekino of a truck barre through it at a high speed. It is called the Okabe Kōsoku Tonneru. One should also note that there is a modern attempt to recreate Hiroshige's original travels in Patrick Carey's Rediscovering the Old Tokaido: In the Footsteps of Hiroshige published by Brill in 2000.

Earlier, in 1590, Toyotomi Hideyoshi had a road constructed through Utsunotani Pass so he could lay siege to the castle at Odawara. This is the road that was used as a leg of the Tōkaidō.

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References to Mt. Utsu prior to the Edo period and the construction of the Tōkaidō Road

Mt. Utsu was made famous by a poem in the 10th century Tales of Ise. Poem #9 reads:

Suruga naru
Utsu no yamabe no
Utsutsu ni mo
Yume ni mo hito ni
Awano narikeri.

Beside Mt. Utsu
In Suruga
I can see you
Neither waking
Nor, alas, even in my dreams

Helen Craig McCullough tells us that "...the first two line serve merely to introduce utsutsu ("reality," "one's waking moments") and to furnish an oblique indication of the poet's whereabouts..." Later she added that the anonymous poet "...plays on the similarity in sound between Utsu and utsutsu."

"The poem hinges on the belief that a person's spirit could visit the dreams of someone he loved. The author says in effect, "It would be too much to hope to meet you here in this remote spot, but if you still loved me your spirit would at least visit my dreams." ****

Muneshige Narazaki in Masterworks of Ukiyo-e: Hiroshige, the 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō (p. 51) noted: "Woodcutters make their way through a narrow pass in the Utsu valley, which has figured prominently in Japanese literature. The unknown author of "The Tales of Ise" (early Heian period) writes of it: "The path before me was dark and narrow; everywhere were vines and maple trees. I felt terribly lonely, and was wondering what frightful thing might befall me there when just then I met a wandering monk." Legend has it that in ancient days there stood on this path a sotoba (a wooden tablet with sacred words written on it and customarily set up beside a grave); passing travelers used to write verses on this sotoba. It is obviously a scene that made a dramatic appeal to the artist."

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Illustrated in a small color reproduction in Kunisada's Tokaido: Riddles in Japanese Woodblock Prints by Andreas Marks, Hotei Publishing, 2013, page 67, T24-22.
Related entities Sanoya Kihei (佐野屋喜兵衛) (publisher)
landscape prints (fūkeiga 風景画) (genre)
beautiful woman picture (bijin-ga - 美人画) (genre)

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