Yawata

A blue stream flows from left to right in the foreground, with a narrow plank bridge laid across it at an angle. On the bridge an old man with a load and a person carrying a mountain of grass cross, while on the left bank an old man with a staff peers into the water. A thatched-roof house stands on the embankment in the middle ground, and a traveler walks along the road beyond.

The embankment is painted in bright green, deepening toward the top. Behind the house a bamboo grove thrives, and farther back two indigo mountains overlap. Within a calm palette of layered cool colors (the blue of the stream, the green of the bank, the indigo of the mountains), the yellow of the thatched roof glows brightly.

Yawata was a post town between Shionata and Mochizuki, and its name is said to derive from the local tutelary Hachiman Shrine. It lay among the farm villages of the Saku plain west of the Chikuma River, where travelers probably crossed one small stream after another among the rice fields.

This is a design by Utagawa Hiroshige. In this series Hiroshige often depicted people working in the countryside around a post town rather than the town's streets, and this print is one such example. The figures are small, shown as a moment in the gentle life of a village.