Kitty Symington / History of Art and Design BA(Hons)

Essay Title, Japanese wood block print

 

Kitagawa Utamaro was one of the most famous woodblock print designers of his time in Edo (Tokyo), Japan, largely specialising in bijinga (pictures of beautiful women). The ukiyo lifestyle, or ‘floating world’, encapsulated a world of leisure, pleasure, art and sexual gratification in the urbanising culture of eighteenth-century Japan. Pleasure quarters, or, more crudely, sex districts, that epitomised this eccentric lifestyle began to emerge within cities across the country. This dissertation takes its main focus as the Yoshiwara quarter in Edo, to which over thirty percent of Utamaro’s subject matter is connected.

Prints became a mass-produced medium of popular culture by the latter half of the eighteenth century and print designers and publishers gained fame within the urban landscape. Utamaro used illusionary techniques in his designs to idealise women and fantasise Yoshiwara for the promotion of the sex industry. When comparing such illusions of representation to the harsh realities of female life in Yoshiwara, it becomes clear that the commodification of these women not only existed within print, but in the wider Japanese culture.

Conventionally, Japanese prints have been considered for their artistic and aesthetic value. However, by viewing these prints as part of a printing industry and medium of popular culture, this dissertation considers them as valuable pieces of cultural evidence. Encountering both feminist and cultural studies, the dissertation moves away from a traditional art-historical standpoint and instead aims to shed light on the impact of a printing industry, established for financial gain, on the commodification of women.

 

Japanese wood block print
Kitagawa Utamaro, Hour of the Monkey [4pm] (Saru no koku), from the series, The Twelve Hours in Yoshiwara (Seirō jūni toki tsuzuki). 1794.

 

Japanese wood block print
Kitagawa Utamaro, Takashima With Fan, 1793.

 

Japanese wood block print
Kitagawa Utamaro, Hour of the Hare, [6am] (U no koku) from the series The Twelve Hours of Yoshiwara (Seirō jūni toki tsuzuki), 1794.