Farmers Traveling/ Yoshida, from the series Exhaustive Illustrations of the Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō (Tōkaidō gojÅ«santsugi ezukushi) Possibly 1810

Curator: This is "Farmers Traveling/ Yoshida, from the series Exhaustive Illustrations of the Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō" by Katsushika Hokusai. Look closely at the scene. Editor: It has a quaint, almost innocent quality. The figures seem dwarfed by the landscape, yet there's a real sense of their journey. Curator: Absolutely. Hokusai's series provides a visual record of the Tōkaidō road, but it also offers insights into social classes and hierarchies of the time. Who had the leisure to ride, and who was tasked with the labor of walking? Editor: And how does gender intersect? We see a woman carrying a basket. These are not merely aesthetic choices; they reflect the lived realities of early 19th-century Japan. Curator: Indeed, viewing Hokusai through a contemporary lens highlights how deeply entrenched such social structures were, and the subtle ways in which art can both reflect and perpetuate them. Editor: It leaves me thinking about how far we’ve come, and how much further we still need to go in dismantling such inequalities.