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Paper short abstract

Ukiyo-e landscapes re-compose space by negotiating convention, place, and prior image. This paper, on the example of Lake Suwa depictions from sansui templates through Hokusai to Hiroshige III, crowdsources georeferencing data to reveal shifts between inherited pictorial logic and shifting canon.

Paper long abstract

Ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints of the Edo period, 1603–1868) do not document the places of the past—they re-compose spaces by bringing together recognizable landscape features and contextual cues so viewers can identify “where” they are looking. When print designers thematized the same known site across generations, they worked from inherited literary and pictorial conventions, the place itself, and specific earlier prints. This paper traces how the balance between these sources shifted and what kind of looking the prints invited: contemplative distance through empty middle grounds, theatrical encounter with a specific place, or recognition of a picture already known. It draws on Yonemoto’s work on spatial vernaculars and publisher advertisements that marketed geographic specificity and applies computationally enhanced viewing: georeferencing data from the virtual platform Drawing from the Crowd where citizen scientists align prints with 3D terrain models, helps make visible shifting patterns of compositional logic between convention and canonical image.

Depictions of Lake Suwa (Suwa-ko 諏訪湖) offer a revealing case. Early depictions in print drew on sansui (layered mountain-water arrangement) conventions with elevated viewpoints and carefully positioned vegetation as ways of signifying the kind of mountain-and-lake views that early print designers inherited and adapted. Hokusai’s “Lake Suwa in Shinano Province” from the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (c. 1830–32) quotes yet transforms this inheritance: a twisted pine dominates the foreground, the lake stretches horizontally, and Fuji floats at a scale no observer could actually see. When Hiroshige III depicted Lake Suwa decades later, he worked from templates that included Hokusai’s pictorial solution—the pine’s position, Fuji’s placement—while still negotiating with actual geography. The quotation layered landscape, convention, and canonical image all at once.