東京紙器株式会社 /

I tried making stamp-style stickers of “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji”

A news story broke that all the works from Katsushika Hokusai’s masterpiece “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” were sold at an auction in New York, USA, for approximately 540 million yen. While the recent depreciation of the yen may have played a role, it also mentioned that ukiyo-e prints have been fetching high prices overseas lately.

Prompted by this news, I became interested in the reevaluation of ukiyo-e prints’ value and looked into the sources of their appreciation and the reasons they are being sold at high prices.

As I delved deeper, I came to understand the beauty of ukiyo-e and the charm of series like “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.” Thinking about how to make this charm more accessible, I felt that our company’s original stamp-style perforated stickers would be a good match.

Therefore, I decided to create an extra-large version of our stickers, which usually can only feature about nine designs per sheet, and make a product that includes all the works from “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.”

Started selling on Amazon

Who is Katsushika Hokusai?

Katsushika Hokusai was one of the leading painters of the Edo period. He was born around 1760, when “nishiki-e” (brocade prints) were emerging, in what is now the Sumida Ward. He is particularly famous for “Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji,” a series of large-format nishiki-e prints depicting various landscapes with views of Mount Fuji, published after he turned 70.

Among these, the most famous is the first print, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa.” It is so renowned that it is even depicted on the reverse side of the new 1,000 yen bill featuring Shibasaburo Kitasato. Despite the title “Thirty-Six Views,” a total of forty-six prints were ultimately produced. Due to the great popularity of the series, ten additional prints were made at the publisher’s request.

The Popularity of Katsushika Hokusai

Katsushika Hokusai is also known as a figure who transformed the world of art. While ukiyo-e prints were commonplace for Japanese people at the time, their high artistic quality and technical skill were astonishing from an overseas perspective.

The aesthetic appreciation of negative space in ukiyo-e, the emphasized contour lines, the gradient-like shading techniques, and the rich colors all greatly influenced prominent European painters. This influence has extended even into modern graphic design.

Among them, Hokusai’s works emphasize dynamism over realism, featuring innovative compositions that boldly place the main subjects and depict the lively lives of Edo’s common people. These elements made his paintings immensely popular as representative artworks of Japan.

Even today, his popularity has not waned. In 1998, he was the only Japanese person to be included in Life magazine’s ranking of “The 100 Most Important People of the Last 1,000 Years.”

Nishiki-e: Art That Is and Isn’t Art

One of the reasons Hokusai’s works were highly regarded is the uniquely developed Japanese printmaking technique. The pinnacle of this technique is nishiki-e. Ukiyo-e refers to the overall genre of paintings depicting the customs of the Edo period, while nishiki-e specifically denotes the multicolored woodblock prints within this genre.

The production of nishiki-e involved a strict division of labor among the publisher, the artist, the carver, and the printer. Despite being vibrant and colorful prints unparalleled in the world, they were mass-produced and sold at affordable prices.

During the Tenpō era (1830–1844) when Hokusai was active, a bowl of soba cost 16 mon, which is roughly equivalent to 500–600 yen today. At the same time, nishiki-e prints were sold for 30–40 mon each, so they could be purchased for about the price of two bowls of soba, approximately 1,000 yen.

Therefore, ukiyo-e were positioned more as entertainment products (commodities) for the general public rather than as fine art. Although they were significant enough to change the course of art history worldwide, their ubiquity led people to overlook their true value. As a result, they were often sold cheaply or disposed of, leading to many of them being exported overseas at low prices.

Unfortunately, due to the effects of wartime destruction, the number of high-quality works remaining in Japan is now very limited.

The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji Turned into Stamp-Style Stickers

First, I researched the size of the original prints of the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, which were approximately 27 cm by 39 cm. By scaling the stickers down to 1/100 of the original size, making them 27 mm by 39 mm, and printing 36 of them on A4-sized sticker paper with perforated edges, I created stamp-style stickers of the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji that maintain the original aspect ratio in miniature.

As mentioned earlier, the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji actually consists of forty-six prints. However, to fit the size constraints, this design intentionally includes only the initial thirty-six prints. There is commercially usable data available for the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, and we utilized this data for this product.

Started selling on Amazon


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2024.06.11

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