Hishu Nagasaki-zu, Map of Nagasaki
You will learn how a woodblock view of Nagasaki describes a harbor city and how Edo-period craftsmen printed that view for ordinary buyers. The short answer is that water-based ink pressed from carved cherry blocks carried both picture and text to paper for an urban readership that rented books and bought single sheets.
What do you see first in a Nagasaki harbor view?
Nagasaki lies at the head of a long bay that forms a natural harbor on the island of Kyushu, and the commercial and residential area stands on a small plain near the end of that bay. Two rivers separated by a mountain spur form two main valleys, and the built-up area remains confined by the terrain. When you hold a view titled Hishu and Nagasaki, you start with that shape because it explains the city. Look for the curve of the bay, the narrow plain, the valleys, and the way temples, streets, and landing places fit between water and slope. A plan of Nagasaki in Hizen province dated 1778 shows how printers already treated this tight topography as the frame for the city portrait. The Wikipedia page on woodblock printing in Japan does not give the name of the cutter who cut this Nagasaki view.
Why was Nagasaki drawn as a place apart?
The port at Nagasaki was set up in 1571 under the supervision of the Jesuit missionary Gaspar Vilela and Portuguese Captain-Major Tristao Vaz de Veiga with the assistance of Omura Sumitada, after Omura granted a permit in 1569 for a port to receive Portuguese ships. The small harbor village grew into a diverse port city, and Portuguese products such as tobacco, bread, textiles, and sponge cakes called castellas entered popular culture in Japan. Tempura came from a Portuguese recipe first known as peixinhos da horta and takes its name from the Portuguese word tempero, while the name also refers to tempora quadragesima, forty days of Lent during which eating meat was forbidden. For your reading of the map, that early exchange explains why a Nagasaki sheet treats foreign landing places, storehouses, and town quarters as parts of one working port. You can place the sheet beside other landmark maps studied plate by plate to see how a port portrait differs from a road map or a province map.
How did Dejima and the Chinese quarter shape the city image?
After the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637, policymakers linked Christianity with disloyalty, the Portuguese were expelled, and the Dutch were moved from Hirado onto Dejima, a purpose-built artificial island in Nagasaki harbor that served as a trading post. The Chinese traders were confined to a walled compound called Tojin yashiki, located near Dejima, and their activity, though less strictly controlled than that of the Dutch, was closely monitored by the Nagasaki bugyo. Up to one third of the population at this time may have been Chinese, and painters such as the eighteenth-century merchant artist Yi Hai moved between the Chinese mainland and Nagasaki. When you read street blocks around the water, keep those two enclosures in mind. They explain why Edo views place such emphasis on controlled landing zones, walls, gates, bridges, and the short water crossings that linked separate quarters.
How was the image moved onto the cherry block?
Woodblock printing in Japan is known for ukiyo-e, but during the same period the method was also used for books, and the method was widely adopted during the Edo period from 1603 to 1868 after its arrival from China, where it had been invented during the Tang dynasty. The procedure for text and image remained much the same. The design was first drawn on thin washi called gampi, then glued face-down onto a plank of close-grained wood, usually smooth cherry, and oil could be used to make the lines more visible. The cutter incised along both sides of each line or area, then chiseled away the wood around the outlines. The block was inked with a brush, and a flat hand-held tool called a baren pressed the paper against the block. The traditional baren has an inner core of bamboo leaves twisted into a rope, held in a disk called ategawa made from thin glued paper wrapped in dampened bamboo leaves with the ends tied to form a handle. You can understand the process from the Japanese woodblock printing technique and then return to the Nagasaki lines with a clearer eye.
How did color reach the page?
Japanese practice used water-based inks rather than the oil-based inks common in Western woodcut, and those inks allowed a wide range of vivid colors, glazes, and transparency. The first prints were single-color ink pictures called sumizuri-e, with extra color sometimes added by hand in a method called kappazuri-e. Printers then developed two registration marks cut into the blocks called kento, which allowed later colors to align precisely over earlier ink layers. The sheet to be printed was placed in the kento, then lowered onto the woodblock. Later stages included a pink monochrome called beni-e, red details added by hand called benizuri-e with green sometimes used as well, orange highlights using a red pigment called tan in tan-e, indigo pictures called aizuri-e, purple pictures called murasaki-e, ink thickened with glue in urushi-e with gold and mica often added, and brocade pictures called nishiki-e. In nishiki-e, a separate block was carved for each color area, and kento marks kept each impression in register. That sequence helps you date the visual effect by color complexity rather than by guesswork.
Who owned the blocks and what did buyers actually read?
Mass production in the Edo period rested on high literacy linked to private schools called terakoya, and Edo alone had more than 600 rental bookstores that lent woodblock-printed illustrated books in many genres. While Saga Books were printed on expensive paper with embellishments for a small circle of literary connoisseurs, other printers in Edo adapted conventional woodblock printing to produce cheaper books in large numbers for general consumption. Genres included travel guides, gardening books, cookbooks, satirical kibyoshi, books on urban culture called sharebon, comic kokkeibon, romantic ninjobon, yomihon, kusazoshi, art books, and play scripts for kabuki and joruri puppet theater. Sellers reprinted successful titles many times, including Life of an Amorous Man by Ihara Saikaku, Nanso Satomi Hakkenden by Takizawa Bakin, and Tokaidochu Hizakurige by Jippensha Ikku. Ownership of the physical blocks acted as the closest equivalent to copyright, since a publisher or person could buy blocks from another and take over production of a text, while there was no legal ownership of ideas and competing theaters routinely reused plays, plots, or characters. Teachers who want to use town views with pupils will find guidance on method in using historic maps in class.
How can you place this Nagasaki sheet in time?
By 1640 woodblocks were again used for nearly all purposes after an interval of movable-type experiments, including a Western-style press brought by the Tensho embassy in 1590 and first used for printing in Kazusa in Nagasaki in 1591, a Korean press seized by Toyotomi Hideyoshi forces in 1593, an edition of the Confucian Analects printed in 1598 at the order of Emperor Go-Yozei, a domestic wooden movable-type press backed by Tokugawa Ieyasu from 1599 at Enko-ji in Kyoto with 100,000 pieces of type commissioned for political and historical books, domestic copper movable-type books from 1605 that did not become mainstream after Ieyasu died in 1616, and artistic Saga Books made by Honami Koetsu and Suminokura Soan at Saga in Kyoto, including the Saga Book of the Tales of Ise printed in 1608. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, ukiyo-e with secular subjects such as kabuki actors, sumo wrestlers, beautiful women, scenic landscapes, and historical tales were mass-produced for ordinary buyers, and Suzuki Harunobu in the eighteenth century established the multicolor nishiki-e method that carried the culture forward. In Nagasaki itself, the ban on Dutch books was lifted in 1720, scholars came to study European science and art, and the city became a center of Dutch learning called rangaku under a hatamoto administrator with the title of Nagasaki bugyo. Measure your sheet against that arc, check paper, kento precision, color blocks, and harbor form, and note each finding on a worksheet before you consult another collection.