The Manga Picture Scrolls of the 53 Stations of the Tōkaidō

In 1921, eighteen members of the Tokyo Manga Association took a trip that followed the Tōkaidō Road, Japan's historic eastern sea route, which linked the political capital of Tokyo (formerly known as Edo) to the cultural capital of Kyoto. Shortly thereafter, the artists produced the Manga Picture Scrolls, which are the focus of this StoryMap. The fifty-five watercolors featured in these scrolls represent the historic Tōkaidō's fifty-three stations plus its starting and ending points at Tokyo's Nihonbashi and Kyoto's Sanjō Ōhashi respectively. Offering a vivid homage to the famous woodblock artist Utagawa Hiroshige, the scrolls feature the same fifty-five stations as Hiroshige's groundbreaking  "Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō" (Tōkaidō Gojūsan-tsugi) , created almost a century earlier in the 1830s.

The interactive map below allows viewers to follow the historic Tōkaidō Road, highlighting the location of each station and its respective watercolor in the manga scrolls. Captioned in each image is an  English translation  of the artist's description of the image and a link to the present-day site of the former station via Google Maps.

 The Manga Picture Scrolls  form part of  The Ohio State University Libraries ' world-class manga collection and are housed at the  Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum . They are contained in a paulownia storage box and are comprised of two signed and sealed hand-painted handscrolls with twenty-seven paintings in scroll 1, and twenty-eight paintings in scroll 2.

To learn more about distinctive and circulating manga in the Libraries' collections, please visit  go.osu.edu/manga . For more information about the Manga Picture Scrolls, as well as links to a  rich set of related K-12 teaching materials , please visit  library.osu.edu/site/manga/2020/10/02/picturethis/ .

Terms of Use

This work may be protected by copyright and is intended only for educational or research purposes.