Hokusai’s Lines of Sight

Hokusai is among the best-known names in Japanese art, and it may be thought that only a deficiency of imagination could lead to more writing on him. Many other artists of his period have been entirely neglected in the contemporary literature. But in fact, there is still more to be said, and this short essay will attempt to introduce some ideas that are probably unknown even to specialists.

Hokusai has come to be thought of internationally as the Japanese artist par excellence, and his “Great Wave off Kanagawa,” from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei), can lay claim to being one of the world’s most widely recognized works (Figure 1). However, Hokusai is not just the Japanese artist that foreigners love to love. In his own day he was widely regarded, and the Thirty-Six Views series just mentioned, which began in 1826, was finally brought to a close only in 1833, ultimately comprising forty-six designs. The extra ten can only have been created in response to clamor from the market.

The realization that Hokusai has been recognized in the West from more or less his own day up until now, however, has undoubtedly added to his status in Japan. Hokusai forms part of the narrative of self-validation that is the country’s “opening,” modernization, and equalization with Europe and North America. Trains steamed to, and ships steamed on from Yokohama, and Western critics praised Hokusai as among the greatest masters of all time. (He died in 1849.) While chinoiserie is often considered a trivializing, decorative mode, japonisme fits snugly within the rhetoric of Japan’s powerful impact on the outside world; japonisme is certainly not just a branch of Orientalism. Hokusai also seemed to show, at just the right time, that Japan was not just a borrowing nation but an originating one, too, as Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists lined up to aver that in him they found an entirely new way of representing the world, and even, indeed, of seeing it.

Figure 1.

Katsushika Hokusai, “Great Wave of Kanagawa,” multicolored woodblock print, from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji, 1826–33.

A century later, in 1983, Tokyo Disneyland was opened. On what grounds we can only wonder, but the name “Hokusai” was chosen for its Japanese restaurant (Figure 2). Surely it was not the case that Hokusai represented Japan, but rather that he represented a robustness for Japan within a space likely to be dominated by the foreign. Hokusai symbolizes a Japan as valued and then singled out for praise by foreigners, but then as replanted back into Japan. His international standing is meaningful because it has been brought home, under the imprimatur of both a self and an other. With its faux U.S. colonial exterior and a faux Japanese “traditional” interior, the restaurant encapsulates a Japan pulsating between the two, not to be colonized and never to be caught; indeed, it is “America” that is colonized. Hokusai makes little sense as the name of a Japanese restaurant in Florida’s Disney World or California’s Disneyland. But where it makes perfect sense is in Tokyo Disneyland.

Hokusai is adduced as a figure of mirrors. It is interesting in this regard that his father is thought to have been a mirror maker of rather high standing. (Some say he was even mirror maker to the shogun.) Born in 1760 in the Katsushika district of Edo (modern Tokyo), Hokusai, then called Tokitarō, would have seen his father at work. He did not however inherit the business, and it has been speculated that he was the son of a mistress. Had he become a literal man of mirrors, Hokusai would not have been sent out to work in a lending library, or moved from there to become a block carver, and thence metamorphose into a professional artist. As it was, he became, in a different sense, a reflective person.

The year 1760 was also when Tokugawa Ieharu took over as the tenth Tokugawa shogun. It was a...