Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō: Inspired by Famous Pictures 1864

Utagawa Kunisada created this woodblock print, titled *Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō: Inspired by Famous Pictures*, in nineteenth-century Japan. Here, Kunisada juxtaposes an image of a Kabuki actor with a Western steamship arriving in Japan. This was a period when Japan was being opened up to the West after a long period of self-imposed isolation. Kunisada seems to comment on this moment of transition. While the lower half of the image shows the actor and his victim in a traditional theatrical pose, the background shows the modern world arriving on Japan's shores. Woodblock prints like this one were popular among the merchant classes and would have been displayed in their homes. The question that historians must ask when analyzing this work is: what did this new era mean to the Japanese people who lived through it? By delving into a range of visual and textual sources, such as newspapers and novels, we can get a better grasp of how nineteenth-century Japanese society adapted to Western influence.