新町店つき

About this print

Behind a lattice sit yujo, courtesans, with beautifully dressed hair. Outside, a man in a checked kimono peers in while the person next to him points. This nishiki-e shows a shop front in Shinmachi, the yukaku (licensed pleasure quarter) of Osaka.

It is one print from Naniwa Hyakkei (One Hundred Views of Naniwa), a series in which three artists, Utagawa Kunikazu, Satonoya Yoshitaki and Nansuitei Yoshiyuki, divided up 100 famous places in Osaka among them, and this print is by Kunikazu (the National Diet Library title writes Naniwa with different characters). It was published at the end of the Edo period by the Osaka publisher Ishiwa. The year is not clear. One view is that the series was planned around the Ansei era and completed between the Bunkyu and Keio eras (1861-68).

Shinmachi, opened early in the Edo period, was the only shogunate-licensed pleasure quarter in Osaka, around today's Shinmachi in Nishi Ward, Osaka City. Shops in Shinmachi appear in works by Ihara Saikaku and Chikamatsu Monzaemon. From the Meiji era on, it gradually became a commercial district, and its old streets were lost in the air raids of 1945.

Glossary