Authors: Ben Ruhe, Scott Skinner
Date Submitted: August 31, 2004
Article Type: Journal

Color woodblock prints vibrantly convey the popular urban culture of 18th and 19th century Edo, now called Tokyo. In a book that brings together two of Edo’s most colorful traditions, prints and kites, John Stevenson celebrates the charm and significance of the mass-produced, elegant broadsheets known as ukiyo-e. The term means “pictures of the floating world,” a pun on a Buddhist concept of the fleeting world of desires that is, coincidentally but poetically, appropriate for a study of kites borne on the wind.

Edo artists experimented with woodblock printing techniques during the 18th century as kiteflying became increasingly popular. Each influenced the other: kitemakers copied woodblock print designs to decorate their creations of bamboo, cloth, and paper, and printers used images of kites in their designs.

The prints are products of Tokugawa Edo (1603-1867) and Meiji Tokyo (1868-1912). They record highlights of the Kabuki theater, brothels, and Sumo wrestling, enthusiastically presenting star actors and celebrity courtesans and vignettes of everyday life. These images capture for us the character of life as it was lived and imagined by the printmakers and kitefliers of Old Japan. It seems that everyone thrills to the sight of a kite straining upward into the sky, and woodblock prints are perhaps the most accessible form of traditional Japanese visual culture.

PDF Link: Journal Issue