The Embassy of Japan hosts an exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints, a designated craft tradition in Tokyo, made by highly skilled craftspeople of the Tokyo Traditional Woodblock Print Association.

During the Edo period (1603 – 1868 CE) prints of everyday life were mass-produced for popular consumption in Japan’s newly flourishing urban centres. They were from a genre, which also include paintings and drawings, called ukiyo-e 浮世絵, or ‘pictures of the floating world’, and are some of the most remarkable achievements of graphic art in Japan, if not the world. These prints would have been sold for little more than the price of a bowl noodles and included themes of well-known landscapes, famous beauties and popular actors and heroes of fiction and the wrestling ring.

The traditional production system of Japanese ukiyo-e prints involves the work of four people: artist, woodblock cutter, printer and publisher. Each is imbued with a deep sense of responsibility for his or her part in order to make the final outcome a success.

Fine_Wind,_Clear_Morning (Red Fuji) (1830-35) after Katsushika Hokusai by_Tokyo_Traditional_Woodblock_Association_craftspeople_(2013)

Works created by craftspeople, who follow this method of printing, from the Tokyo Traditional Woodblock Print Association are displayed against those from the heyday of the ukiyo-e prints in Japan in the nineteenth century through to the delicate paint-like qualities of artists from of the Shin Hanga movement of the first decades of the twentieth century.

Discover how these prints are made in Japan today and experience for yourself how the nineteenth-century Japanese artists’ approach to line, colour and form became such an inspiration for artists in Europe.

Toshusai Sharaku (1794)
Matsumoto Koshiro IV as fish seller Sakanaya Gorobei

Matsumoto Koshiro IV as fish seller Sakanaya Gorobei (1794)
after Toshusai Sharaku
by Tokyo Traditional Woodblock Association craftspeople (1975)

JICC