Yokkaichi

Utagawa Kuniyoshi is one of the most renowned Edo-period print designers. Although his career began with struggles, including a stint selling reed mats, Kuniyoshi eventually achieved significant fame, leading a large studio of pupils and influencing art well into the late 19th century. His designs were so popular that admirers frequently had them tattooed onto their bodies. Notably, he often incorporated Western drawing techniques and perspective into his compositions.

This print, Yokkaichi, depicts a young woman tenderly stroking the head of a stone Inari fox guardian outside Nezu Gongen Shrine in the port city of Yokkaichi, or "Fourth-day Market," in Mie Prefecture, west of Edo (modern-day Tokyo). The work is a mitate-e composition, a clever and intellectual play on culturally significant themes and pictorial traditions. This print recalls the classical Chinese theme of the Eight Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers. Additionally, the work is self-referential: its figures are borrowed from Kuniyoshi’s earlier mitate-e series.

In Shinto belief, the kami spirit Inari, often represented as a fox, is linked to rice cultivation, prosperity, and fertility. This theme resonates throughout the composition, from the Inari fox guardian to the distant landscape, which features a bustling waterway, ferries, fishing boats, and white-plastered warehouses storing rice in what was then a major center of sea trade. The work’s layered symbolism deepens its appeal: Inari was also associated with fertility, and women would pray to the deity for children. Paradoxically, Inari was the patron spirit of both prosperity and the entertainment world, including brothels—a duality Kuniyoshi’s contemporaries would have found provocative and amusing. 

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