Nihonbashi in Edo

The title is "Nihonbashi," yet the bridge itself is almost invisible. Only the giboshi (ornamental finials on the posts) of the railing, the hats and heads of passersby, and the loads they carry line the bottom edge of the picture. The viewer stands in the crowd on the bridge, looking west.

On both banks of the Nihonbashi River, white-walled warehouses continue without a gap, and the lines of their roofs converge toward a single point in the distance. The composition adopts Western linear perspective, in which things shrink with distance and lines meet at one point. At the point where the lines converge stands a turret of Edo Castle, and beyond it, Fuji. Boats laden with cargo line the river, and porters work along the banks. A wooden fence runs along the left bank, and the white walls of the warehouses on the right bear the marks of merchant houses. The sky near the horizon is faintly tinged with vermilion.

Nihonbashi was the starting point of the highways and, with its merchants' warehouses lining the river, the center of Edo's distribution. By capturing both the jostling noise in the foreground and the calm of the castle and Fuji in the distance, the print shows at once the bustle of the town and the face of Edo as a capital.