Yokohama’s opening as a treaty port created sustained, face-to-face encounters between Japanese residents and foreign visitors, setting the social conditions that later made Yokohama prints (Yokohama-e) a marketable visual genre.
Publishers and artists—especially from the Utagawa school—begin producing Yokohama-e in response to popular curiosity about newly arrived foreigners, using familiar ukiyo-e formats to depict novel subjects such as foreign dress, customs, and technologies.
Utagawa Yoshitora’s foreigner prints (e.g., series portraying “people of foreign countries”) exemplify how Yokohama-e circulated standardized “types” of foreigners—an important step in translating international contact into repeatable visual motifs.
In Yokohama, Charles Wirgman begins publishing The Japan Punch (1862–1887), a long-running illustrated satirical magazine. Its hybrid of Western cartooning and local observation helped expand the visual vocabulary of modern print culture alongside woodblock publishing.
Utagawa Sadahide produces illustrated guidebooks on the open port (notably the multi-volume Yokohama kaikō kenmonshi, 1862–66). These publications show how image-and-text formats documented foreign residents, goods, and technologies for Japanese readers.
A Tokugawa shogunate delegation participates in the 1867 Paris exposition, where Sadahide’s views of Edo are exhibited—an early instance of Japanese print imagery entering international exhibition circuits that later shaped Meiji-era visual internationalization.
For the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair, Japan organized a government-led effort to present manufactures and cultural objects abroad, using international expositions to shape foreign perceptions and promote exports—context that heightened attention to Japanese visual arts internationally.
The triptych “First steam train leaving Yokohama” (ca. 1872) visualizes rail travel as a symbol of modernization and international connectedness, linking Yokohama’s port culture with Meiji infrastructure in a mass-circulated print format.
Kobayashi Kiyochika returns to Tokyo in 1874 and soon develops a distinctive print style influenced by Western pictorial effects (light/shadow), helping define Meiji-era print modernity beyond early Yokohama-e’s “foreigner curiosity” focus.
Between 1876 and 1881, Kiyochika produces “Famous Places of Tokyo” (Tokyo Meisho-zu), using quasi-Western rendering of illumination and atmosphere to document an internationalizing capital—parallel to Yokohama’s port imagery but centered on urban transformation.
By the 1880s, the intense boom in Yokohama-e slows; visual attention increasingly moves from depicting foreigners per se toward kaika-e and other Meiji genres that framed modernization and “civilization and enlightenment” as domestic social change.
In 1881, Inoue Yasuji publishes the first installment of Tokyo Meisho, adopting Westernized print effects learned via Kiyochika. Such works show how Meiji printmakers blended imported visual techniques with local subjects for new urban audiences.
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s 1881 series “Tōkyō kaika kyōga meishō” uses caricature and humor to depict modern urban life—an example of Meiji print culture internalizing international influences (press satire, caricature) while addressing Japanese modernization.
War reporting in color woodblock prints expands Meiji-era mass imagery beyond port scenes: Watanabe Nobukazu’s dated triptychs (e.g., October 20, 1894) show how printmakers visualized Japan’s new international military role for broad audiences.
Yokohama Prints and the Internationalization of Meiji-era Visual Arts (1870s–1900s)
