Paper short abstract:

This paper explores visual imaginaries of the poetic trope of Mu Tamagawa or 'Six Jewel Rivers' in Edo-period popular printed culture from the perspective of materiality, the physical features of objects embedded in social and cultural practices.

Paper long abstract:

Imagining Mu Tamagawa: Visuality and Materiality of Landscape Prints in the Late Edo Period.

In the last decades 'landscape' has been the subject of extensive investigation by art historians, human geographers, ecocritics and others. Since the groundbreaking study by Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (1989), who perceived 'landscape as a way of seeing', scholars have been discussing it as a social rather than a 'natural' phenomenon, and one often implicated with power (W.J.T. Mitchell, 2002). However, when it comes to the study of images commonly defined as 'landscapes' the question of 'representation' of topography and its meaning tends to prevail, rather than inquiry into the material role of visual praxis, and issues of the object's circulation and its performativity and ever-changing agency.

This paper explores visual imaginaries of the poetic trope of Mu Tamagawa or 'Six Jewel Rivers' which flourished in Edo-period popular printed culture. It will interrogate selected prints designed by Kitagawa Utamaro (ca. 1753-1806), Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), and Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861) in with regard to materiality, the physical features of objects embedded in social and cultural practices, and the spaces in which the objects were produced, consumed, and displayed.

The paper notes that although related to specific places, i.e. six Tamagawa rivers, visual imaginaries of the Mu Tamagawa theme are dominated by human figures, with the notable exception of works created in the 1830s and 1850s, two critical époques in Japanese social and environmental history, which were impacted respectively by the Tenpō Famine and the Ansei Earthquakes. It explores circumstantial relationships between images and their socio-historical contexts that may underlie this shift in pictorialization conventions. It also argues that on the one hand, this shift points to a characteristic performativity of poetry, but on the other hand, it also challenges the paradigms of 'representation' that perceive visual objects as texts while disregarding their diverse social functions.