Glossary
Glossary
Photos and Prints
- Nishiki-e
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Nishiki-e are brightly colored woodblock prints, made by printing one color at a time from a separate block for each. Most ukiyo-e prints are nishiki-e.
They appeared around 1765, growing out of picture calendars made by Suzuki Harunobu and others. The name means "brocade pictures," because they were as beautiful as woven brocade. Each print was the work of a team: an artist drew the design, a carver (horishi) cut a block for each color, and a printer (surishi) printed them, while a publisher (hanmoto) put the prints on sale. In the Meiji era, nishiki-e also showed the new things arriving from the West. In a print from 1873, people in kimono and people in dresses wait for the train side by side on the same platform.
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- Print series (soroimono)
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A soroimono is a set of nishiki-e prints on a single theme. Today we would call it a series.
Tokai Meisho Kaisei Dochuki (Famous Places of the Tokaido, Revised Travel Guide), from 1875, is a series of 60 prints by Utagawa Hiroshige III: 59 views from Nihonbashi to Kyoto plus a table of contents. Besides the post towns, it shows famous sights nearby, including a telegraph office and a fish market. On its contents sheet, signs and boards bearing the names of the post towns hang packed together from the eaves of a shop. Naniwa Hyakkei (One Hundred Views of Naniwa) is a series of 100 views of Osaka, divided among three artists.
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- Triptych (sanmai tsuzuki)
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A triptych (sanmai tsuzuki) is a set of three nishiki-e sheets that form one large picture when placed side by side. The wide format leaves room for big crowds.
The large print size called oban measures about 39 by 27 centimeters. Wide views and big crowds were drawn across two or three oban sheets joined together. Many of the Meiji railway prints on this site are triptychs too, fitting the station building, the platform and a moving train into one picture. In Rokugo Jokisha Tetsudo no Zu (Steam Train Railway at Rokugo), a ferry carrying passengers, rickshaws and all, stretches across the center and right sheets.
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- Photo album (shashincho)
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A shashincho is a book for keeping many photos together, what we would now call a photo album.
It can also be written with a different character for "cho," and both are pronounced the same way, "shashincho." Dictionaries describe it as a book for sorting and keeping photos, pasted in or slipped between the pages. On this site, photos come from albums such as Kyoto Meishocho (Album of Famous Places in Kyoto, 1909) and Kyoto Osaka Imayo Bijin Fuzoku (Beauties of Today in Kyoto and Osaka, 1903). In Kyoto Meishocho, each photo has its name printed underneath in both Japanese and English.
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- Collotype
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Collotype is a printing method that uses a glass plate coated with gelatin. It reproduces a photograph's tones on paper with their smooth gradations intact.
Ordinary printing shows a photo's tones with halftone dots, tiny dots of different sizes. Collotype uses no halftone dots, so the result looks close to a real photograph. Only a limited number of copies can be printed, which makes it well suited to reproducing famous paintings and calligraphy. In Japan, the photographer Ogawa Kazumasa was the first to open a collotype printing works in the late 1880s. The gelatin film on the plate forms fine wrinkles, like crepe fabric.
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Highways and Travel
- Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido
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The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido are the 53 post towns along the Tokaido highway between Nihonbashi in Edo and Sanjo Bridge in Kyoto.
"Tsugi," the word translated as "stations," means post towns, and the name comes from the 53 post towns between Nihonbashi and Sanjo Bridge. The nishiki-e series by Utagawa Hiroshige I is especially well known. In 1875, Hiroshige III produced Tokai Meisho Kaisei Dochuki, which also shows a telegraph office and people with Western umbrellas. Fukuroi-juku in Shizuoka Prefecture is the 27th post town whether you count from Edo or from Kyoto, right in the middle of the fifty-three.
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- Post town (shukuba)
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Post towns (shukuba) were towns set along the highways. Travelers stayed the night there, and the porters and horses carrying baggage were changed for fresh ones.
Post towns were lined with honjin, where daimyo (feudal lords) and other high-ranking travelers stayed, and hatago, inns for ordinary travelers. Keeping a set number of porters and horses ready to carry goods to the next post town was also one of a post town's duties. On the Tokaido, that meant 100 porters and 100 horses. Mariko, said to be the smallest post town on the Tokaido, was known for its tororo-jiru, a soup of grated yam.
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- Honjin
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A honjin was an inn in a post town where daimyo (feudal lords) and other high-ranking travelers stayed. Ordinary travelers stayed at hatago.
Post towns also had a backup inn, the waki-honjin. On the Tokaido, the only honjin buildings still standing are at Futagawa-juku and Kusatsu-juku. The Futagawa honjin is open to the public as a museum. The only waki-honjin building left on the old Tokaido is at Maisaka-juku. At Fujikawa-juku, the gate of the old waki-honjin and the stone walls of the old honjin still remain.
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- Hatago
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A hatago was an inn in a post town for ordinary travelers, separate from the honjin, where daimyo and other high-ranking travelers stayed.
Hatago served meals, and samurai stayed there as well as commoners. Totsuka-juku, the fifth post town from Nihonbashi, did a lively trade as the first night's stop for travelers who left Edo in the morning. At Akasaka-juku, the building of an Edo-period hatago called Koiya survives as Ohashiya. It is thought to have been built after a great fire in 1809, and Toyokawa City has restored it and opens it to the public free of charge.
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- Tateba
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A tateba was a rest stop between post towns. Tea stalls lined the road, and travelers and kago (palanquin) bearers stopped to catch their breath.
The name is said to come from porters and palanquin bearers standing their staffs up (tate) while they rested. To protect the post towns, staying the night at a tateba was not allowed. In the Meiji era, rickshaw and horse-drawn carriage stands were also called tateba. In a nishiki-e of a boat landing on a canal in Hamamatsu, the characters for "tateba" can be seen on a shop's curtain. At the Sakaigi tateba, between Hodogaya and Totsuka, the local specialty was botamochi, rice cakes covered in sweet bean paste.
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- Ferry crossing (watashi)
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A watashi was a crossing where boats carried people and goods over a river or stretch of sea that had no bridge. The boats were called watashibune, ferryboats.
In the Edo period, several large rivers on the Tokaido had no bridges. At some, like the Oi River, travelers were carried across by porters (kawagoshi); at others, like the Fuji River, they crossed by ferry. From Miya (now Atsuta Ward, Nagoya) to Kuwana, the route went by boat over the sea: the Shichiri no Watashi (Seven-Ri Crossing). The Rokugo River, long crossed by ferry, got a railway bridge when the railway opened in 1872, and a road bridge in 1874.
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- Teishaba
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Teishaba is an old word for a railway station. In the early Meiji era, stations were called "sutenshon," from the English word, and teishaba came into wide use later.
In 1872, Japan's first railway opened between Shinbashi and Yokohama. The station at the Tokyo end was Shinbashi Teishaba, and nishiki-e titles also call it "Shinbashi Sutenshon." Teishaba is still a term in Japan's railway law, and it lives on in the names of prefectural roads such as "... Teishaba Line." Shinbashi Teishaba was renamed Shiodome Station in 1914, when Tokyo Station opened. Today the Old Shinbashi Station, a re-creation of the original station's exterior, stands there.
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Towns and Everyday Life
- Edo
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Edo is the pre-Meiji name of the city at the heart of today's Tokyo. The age when the shogunate ruled from there is called the Edo period.
On the 17th day of the 7th month of Keio 4 (1868), Edo was renamed Tokyo. Kyoto, by contrast, was sometimes called Saikyo, the "Western Capital." In the Edo period, Osaka was written 大坂, and the present characters, 大阪, came into wide use around 1877. On its Japanese pages, this site also writes 大坂 when talking about the Edo period. In Hiroshige III's Tokaido series, the characters for Saikyo can be seen on the sign at Sanjo Bridge, the last stop.
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- Shinchi
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Shinchi means newly opened land, or a new town built on it. In Osaka, it could also mean a pleasure quarter that grew up there.
In Edo-period Osaka, new towns created by river works and land reclamation were called "... Shinchi." Kitashinchi grew out of Dojima Shinchi, opened in 1688, and Sonezaki Shinchi, opened in 1708. In 1912 the Sonezaki River was filled in, and the two merged into today's Kitashinchi. The name Sonezaki Shinchi still survives as a neighborhood name in Kita Ward.
- Pleasure quarter (kagai)
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A kagai, or pleasure quarter, is a district where courtesan houses, geisha houses and the like once stood together. In Kyoto today, the word means the districts where maiko and geiko work.
The same characters can also be read "hanamachi." Some photos on this site have the name of a kagai beneath them, such as "Kyoto Gion," "Osaka Nanchi" and "Kitashinchi." Nanchi in Osaka was a kagai made up of five neighborhoods, including Soemoncho. In Gion, Kyoto, the spring dance performance Miyako Odori began in 1872 as a side attraction at the Kyoto Exhibition. It is still held every April, and the curtain rises to the cry of "Yoiyasa!"
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- Ochaya and okiya
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An ochaya is a house where customers call in geisha and hold parties. An okiya is the house that geisha and maiko belong to.
Geisha go out from their okiya to the ochaya or restaurant where the customers are waiting. An ochaya has its own banquet rooms and arranges geisha, drinks and food at the customer's request. An okiya does not receive customers in its own house, and in the Kansai region it was also called a yakata. According to a plaque in Kitashinchi on the area's history, in 1918 Kitashinchi had 11 geisha okiya and 153 kashiseki, houses that rented out rooms for parties.
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- Geiko (geisha) and maiko
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A geiko, or geisha, entertains guests at banquets with singing, dancing and the shamisen. A maiko is a young apprentice still in training to become a geiko.
In Kyoto, geisha are called geiko, while in Tokyo and elsewhere the word geisha has long been the usual one. In Kyoto, the step from maiko to geiko is called erikae, "changing the collar." Maiko wear kimono with long sleeves and a long, hanging darari obi, so they can be told apart from geiko at a glance. Kyoto maiko wear hana-kanzashi, hair ornaments shaped like seasonal flowers, and the flowers change every month.
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- Licensed quarter (yukaku)
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A licensed quarter (yukaku) was a district where courtesan houses were gathered together and set apart by an enclosure. They lasted from the time of Toyotomi Hideyoshi until the late 1950s.
Yukaku can also be written with a different character. Courtesan houses kept courtesans and entertained customers. The second character of yukaku, which can also be read kuruwa, originally meant the enclosure around a castle or fort. Licensed quarters were opened with permission from the shogunate or other authorities, and the best known were Yoshiwara in Edo, Shimabara in Kyoto and Shinmachi in Osaka. They disappeared in the late 1950s, when the Anti-Prostitution Act took effect. The nishiki-e "Shinmachi Kuruwa-chu, Kuken Yozakura" (Night Cherry Blossoms at Kuken, in the Shinmachi Quarter), from the series Naniwa Hyakkei, shows the cherry blossoms at night in Kukencho, in Shinmachi.
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- Nihongami and mage
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Nihongami are traditional Japanese women's hairstyles, shaped with hair oil and put up. The mage is the chignon, the part where the hair is gathered and bound.
Roughly speaking, nihongami are made up of the front hair (maegami), the side locks puffed out to each side (bin), the back hair puffed out behind (tabo), and the mage, gathered and folded back. Each style had its own name, such as the shimada mage and the momoware. In 1871, a decree said men no longer had to wear the topknot (chonmage), and the cropped zangiri haircut spread. A nishiki-e of Nihonbashi from 1875 shows a man with zangiri hair and hakama trousers crossing the same bridge as people still wearing topknots.
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- Sokuhatsu
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Sokuhatsu is a way of putting up the hair that was born in the Meiji era, based on Western hairstyles. It spread alongside nihongami.
In 1885, a doctor and an economics journalist founded the Fujin Sokuhatsu-kai (Women's Sokuhatsu Society), arguing that nihongami, set hard with oil, were inconvenient and unhygienic, and urging women to wear sokuhatsu instead. A nishiki-e from the same year, Dai Nihon Fujin Sokuhatsu Zukai (Illustrated Guide to Sokuhatsu for the Women of Japan), shows sokuhatsu styles called agemaki, sagemaki, "English knot" and "magareito." Women who dressed in kimono kept wearing nihongami, and the two styles continued side by side until around the late 1930s or early 1940s.
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Units and Years
- Ri (unit of distance)
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The ri was a unit of distance used in old Japan. One ri was 36 cho, about 3.9 kilometers.
Nishiki-e titles give the distance to the next post town in ri, as in "4 ri to Odawara." The Weights and Measures Act of 1891 fixed the length of the shaku, which made one ri about 3.927 kilometers. Along the highways of the Edo period, a mound of earth called an ichirizuka was built at every ri as a landmark for travelers. At the site of the Ishiyakushi post town in Mie Prefecture, the remains of an ichirizuka can still be seen.
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- Cho (unit of distance)
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The cho was a unit of distance shorter than the ri. It is also written with a different character. One cho is about 109 meters, and 36 cho make one ri.
The nishiki-e title "16 cho to Akasaka" means it is 16 cho, about 1.7 kilometers, to Akasaka, the next post town. One cho is 60 ken, and one ken is about 1.8 meters. The cho was also used as a unit for the area of fields. The "cho" at the end of neighborhood names, such as Soemoncho, means something else. The 16 cho from Goyu to Akasaka was the shortest distance between neighboring post towns on the Tokaido.
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- Yen, sen and rin
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Yen, sen and rin are the units of money set in the Meiji era. One yen is 100 sen, and one sen is 10 rin.
They were set by the New Currency Act of 1871. When the railway between Shinbashi and Yokohama opened in 1872, the fares were 1 yen 12 sen 5 rin for upper class, 75 sen for middle class and 37 sen 5 rin for lower class. Sen and rin coins and notes could no longer be used after the end of 1953. Even so, the sen lives on in exchange rates, and news reports still read rates out as, for example, "150 yen 25 sen to the dollar."
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- Era names (gengo) and the Japanese calendar (wareki)
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Gengo are era names such as Meiji and Taisho. Wareki is the Japanese calendar, and the word is also used for years counted by era name.
Before Meiji, the era name was changed after disasters, auspicious events and the like, sometimes several times during one emperor's reign. From Meiji on, the rule became one era name per emperor. The calendar changed too: the 3rd day of the 12th month of Meiji 5 became January 1 of Meiji 6 (1873). So dates in the Japanese calendar up to Meiji 5 fall on different months and days in the Western calendar. The railway between Shinbashi and Yokohama opened on the 12th day of the 9th month of Meiji 5, which was October 14, 1872, and today's Railway Day falls on that date.
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