Old Man Crazy About Printing
Japan's most beloved visual artist was a product of its distinctive book culture
The artist we know as Katsushika Hokusai changed his name thirty times in his long career, variously signing his pictures with names like Tokitaro, Kako, Gakyojin, Litsu Hitsu, Manji Rojin, over the years, each name announcing a shift in his style, his attitude, his religious views, his social status, or simply his mood towards the world and his pictures. He published some thirty thousand of them in his lifetime, averaging a complete drawing every twenty hours of his adult life until his death at ninety. Having planned to live until at least 110, when astrological signs suggested he would finally understand his craft, he told the bodhisattva Myoken that he would settle for 100 if it meant he could finish his remaining projects. One of the last names he used was Old Man Crazy About Drawing.
“From the age of six I had a penchant for copying the form of things, and from about fifty, my pictures were frequently published; but until the age of seventy, nothing that I drew was worthy of notice. At seventy-three years, I was somewhat able to fathom the growth of plants and trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects, and fish. Thus, when I reach eighty years, I hope to have made increasing progress, and at ninety to see further into the underlying principles of things, so that at one hundred years I will have achieved a divine state in my art, and at one hundred and ten, every dot and every stroke will be as though alive. Those of you who live long enough, bear witness that these words of mine prove not false.”
We know him best as Katsushika Hokusai because that was the name he signed to the Hokusai Manga, the first in a decades-long string of masterworks he produced in the final decades of his life. But unlike One Hundred Ghost Stories, A Tour of the Waterfalls of the Provinces, One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji, and the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Unlike those later works, however, which have been widely published in the West for a century, the only the tiniest fraction of the complete Hokusai Manga has been published outside Japan until a few years ago, when Thames & Hudson released a beautiful three-volume set of the pictures—still not the complete Manga but far and away the best, most affordable way to get them on paper outside of Japan. I got my hands on a copy recently, and have been looking at Hokusai’s pictures with great pleasure.
But first, we must unpack that word manga, heavy with associations to Japan’s modern, world-conquering comics business and its robots, monsters, and bizarre pornography. In Hokusai’s day, the word was simply a contraction meaning whimsical pictures, images made with no purpose or function except to exist for themselves. And this is exactly what the Hokusai Manga is: a series of sketches that contain the world, as seen and drawn by Hokusai: wrestlers, laborers, courtesans, kitchenware, ghosts, mountains, animals, trees, farmers, wind, expressions, myths, karate techniques, horses, kimono patterns, battle scenes, architecture, gods, and furniture. It is an unusual kind of art book, not only for its lack of focus (and this from an artist most famous for his obsession with Fujiyama), but for its runaway popularity, with countless print runs over a span of multiple decades. Unique among best-sellers, it is both a masterpiece of graphic art and an educational manual.
In 1814, Hokusai was already a well-known craftsman and printmaker in Edo, then (as now, though we call it Tokyo) the world’s largest, best-managed city, its society the most literate the world had ever known, with more than three-quarters of the people able to read and write. A large and prosperous middle class was able to support a massive publishing industry, churning out thousands of new books every year and distributing them through hundreds of local bookshops and some six hundred lending libraries.
These books—mostly trashy novels, bawdy poetry cycles, and religious tracts—were always illustrated. Owing to the quirks of the Japanese writing system (moveable type is practically impossible when you have ten thousand characters in use), all printing was done with carved woodblocks. Unlike Western publishing, then, where printing pictures involved considerable extra expense and labor, adding pictures to Japanese books took no extra effort—the whole page had to be carved anyway, so why not carve a few pictures, too?
With his boundless imagination, knowledge of different styles (he seems to have taught himself Western perspectival techniques through smuggled artworks, one of the first in Japan to understand its possibilities) and knack for dramatic compositions, Hokusai quickly made a name for himself through his book illustrations, establishing his own studio and taking on apprentices.
As master of the studio, Hokusai would have trained his apprentices in painting in his style: the official Hokusai method for drawing birds, clouds, faces, waves—everything. But as an unusually successful and popular illustrator with a busy schedule, direct instruction of all his pupils would take too much time. The usual solution to this problem would be to draw up an etehon, or drawing manual, for his students to study and copy. But then, as a publisher friend pointed out, Hokusai had an unusually large public following—why stop at one etehon for a dozen students when thousands of fans would buy a printed version?
And so, in 1813, the Hokusai Manga was released, a slim collection of pictures printed on high-quality paper, its images in black, white, gray, and a kind of rosy ochre used for accents, emphasis, and flesh tones in the portraits and figures. The book must have been an instant success: within a few months, a second volume of drawings came out, then a third, fourth, fifth, and more. Within seven years, there were ten volumes, with another five appearing sporadically over the next forty years. Forewords to the various editions speak of Hokusai fever, of readers weeping with joy over the beauty and vitality of the pictures, their naturalism and grace, of rival artists sputtering with frustrated envy.
Of course, these forewords were advertisements for the potential customer. Still, Hokusai’s printed sketchbooks really were a best-seller, one of the most widely-available and preserved books of its time through the sheer scale of its distribution and reprintings. These extant copies tell the story of its reception: some are pristine and well-preserved, especially Western copies which were often cut from their flimsy paper binding and rebound in a sturdy, leather cover to protect the exotic, expensive imported work; others are tattered with use, covered in doodles, marginalia, and attempts to copy by amateur artists studying Hokusai’s style.
Hokusai went from a popular artist to a kind of superstar, invited to display his works and talents at festivals and for wealthy patrons. Most famously, he was challenged at a Nagoya festival to paint a massive picture on a roll of paper measuring 18 by 11 meters. Painting with buckets of ink and a great mop, he quickly made a portrait of the Zen master Daruma. His fame, and the fans who guaranteed that every publishing project would earn back its investment, gave Hokusai a kind of free reign that no graphic artist had ever had in Japan. Though The Great Wave Off Kanagawa is now held up as the classic image of Japanese art, the print—as well as the whole Thirty-Six Views of Fujiyama—was revolutionary in its time for its huge swathes of Prussian blue, an imported blue pigment that had only just appeared in Japan and still too expensive for most print studios.
These prints were so widespread and, at least in some forms, so cheap, that they were even recycled as wrapping paper for ceramics—one of the few products the Japanese government allowed for export to the West at the time. In this way, along with a few smuggled copies of the Manga brought by the handful of Dutch traders allowed to stay on Dejima Island in Nagasaki, Hokusai and his peers (mainly Utamoro and Hiroshige) made their way to Europe. Just as photography was beginning to unsettle Western painting and its reliance on realism, here was an entirely new kind of painting, with its unreal planes, strange colors, and exotic figures. To Degas, Cassatt, Van Gogh, and the other inventors of modern painting caught up in the Japonisme of the late 19th century, it was a given that Hokusai was one of the great artists of the century, if not for all time.
At home, though, the story was different: Hokusai wasn’t an artist at all. He was a printmaker, nothing more, no more an artist to Japan’s cultural elite than a digital effects specialist would be to us today. For the upper classes, “art” was a matter of individual paintings, done with brush and ink in a handful of approved, Chinese-inflected styles and for a small circle of admirers and patrons, as far away from lowly commerce as possible. And even among connoisseurs of these ukiyo-e—pictures of the floating world, as the Buddhist euphemism for fleeting, secular life has it—Hokusai was talented, but his subject matter was dull, all mountains and laborers rather than the racy portraits of prostitutes, sumo champs, and actors that most printmakers specialized in.
His greatest defenders were the public and his publishing friends, who continued to champion his work—if not for its artistic merits, then at least for their commercial profits. Only later, as tastes changed and Western fascination with ukiyo-e invited reevaluation of these disposable comics did Hokusai assume his place as Japan’s most beloved artist.
He is more than that: working between different media, using novel technologies and techniques, churning endlessly-reproducible artworks with no “original” copy, internationally famous, combining high and low forms—Hokusai is, it seems, one of the world’s first truly modern, global artists, famous in a way that very few creators before him could have been, and pointing the way for all those who followed in his wake. The Hokusai Manga may be available digitally, but thank God it’s finally available in print. Books, after all, were Hokusai’s first home.
Further Reading & Viewing:
All information & quotes about Hokusai come from the scholarly introductions & postscripts that bookend Thames & Hudson’s three-volume edition reviewed here.
Unless otherwise stated in the caption, all images used here are from the Freer Gallery of Art’s Pulverer Collection, which has digitized the entire Hokusai Manga series. It should be noted that the new printed edition of the Manga by Thames & Hudson has restored much of the color and clarity of the prints from the faded versions that appear in this essay.
Anybody curious to know more about the structure, nature, and meaning of Hokusai’s mature work is encouraged to read Jason Farrago’s excellent close-reading of Ejiri in Suruga Province from the Thirty-Six Views, one of the best pieces of art criticism I’ve read in recent memory.
There are dozens of articles and chapters on Japonisme and the influence of ukiyo-e on European art. I have relied chiefly on this BBC article to make sure I wasn’t messing up any of the information I’ve accrued reading on this subject over the years.