安倍川橋　静岡　まり子迄一里半

About this print

Rickshaws, horses and people holding umbrellas cross a long wooden bridge spanning the river. At the foot of the bridge are a hut and a lantern (toro), and on the riverbed in front, women are busy washing. The tag at lower right has characters that can be read as "bridge length 280 ken." One ken is about 1.8 meters, so that is about 500 meters.

In the Edo period the Abe River had no bridge, and travelers crossed with the help of kawagoshi porters. In 1874 (Meiji 7), a year before Utagawa Hiroshige III's Tokai Meisho Kaisei Dochuki (Famous Places of the Tokaido, Revised Travel Guide) came out, a local man, Miyazaki Sogo, used his own money to build a wooden bridge. It was the first bridge over any of the four great rivers of Shizuoka Prefecture: the Fuji, the Abe, the Oi and the Tenryu. The National Diet Library titles the series Kaisei Gojusan Eki (The Fifty-three Stations, Revised).

The present Abekawa Bridge is the third, an iron bridge completed in 1923 (Taisho 12).

Glossary