Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) may not be a global household name, but Under the Wave Off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki namiura) is one of the most recognisable artworks in the world. Created in 1831, this iconic woodblock print depicts a dramatic ocean wave towering over three small fishing boats, the snow-capped cone of Mount Fuji in the distance. It was one image in Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, a series of woodblock images published by Hokusai and Nishimura Yohachi, presenting the sacred mountain as viewed from different locations and perspectives.
Entire books have been written on the impact and significance of The Great Wave (as it came to be known internationally) and its impact around the world. It has been endlessly copied, parodied, reproduced, replicated, remixed, and reinterpreted since its creation. It was a touchstone for early twentieth-century Japonism, and today is a visual shorthand for Japanese culture. This artwork can be read on multiple levels; it illuminates aspects of the society and time during which it was produced, but has also taken on many new meanings over time. This piece explores a few of these readings.
Hokusai's Kajikazawa in Kai Province, from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.
Evoking the wide Berlin blue yonder
Blue is the predominant colour in The Great Wave. This subtle tonalities of blue here are thanks to the use of Prussian or Berlin blue, a synthetic pigment developed in Germany in the early eighteenth century. While this intensely-hued, saturated pigment had been imported into Japan in small quantities via the Dutch or via China since the 1780s if not earlier, it was expensive and exotic, and as such used sparingly — it would have been unusual to see Berlin blue in woodblock prints. The release of a predominantly blue woodblock print would have evoked a sense of the foreign to contemporary consumers, especially with the related connotations of blue-and-white Chinese porcelains. Thus, the use of this blue in The Great Wave imbued a familiar motif like Mt. Fuji with an exotic, exciting air.
Strike a (Kabuki) pose
Anyone who views The Great Wave is likely to first notice the sheer scale of the wave dwarfing the fishing boats. There is an almost theatrical quality to the way it curves upwards and looms over the hapless fishermen, and the canny use of perspective here makes it seem as though the wave also towers over the distant peak of Mt. Fuji. For nineteenth century viewers, this would have also been reminiscent of the stop-action pose, mie, the high point in a Kabuki play where an actor strikes a dramatic pose.
Movement and geometry
Out of all 36 images in the series depicting views of Mount Fuji, why has The Great Wave achieved such long-lasting fame? One reason may have to do with its intrinsically striking composition. In this image, the great wave looms in the foreground in a dramatic circular sweep, framing the distant cone of Mount Fuji. The fishing boats are pared down to their simplest geometric forms, echoing the rhythm and energy of the wave that tosses them to and fro. The various elements of the image are distilled to their most necessary components, in a way that would be familiar to present-day graphic designers. One could say that The Great Wave operates in a similar milieu to graphic design — or rather, that the latter is indebted to Hokusai for pioneering many creative compositional techniques.
Making waves around the world
Single-sheet prints of The Great Wave rapidly circulated in Europe and America during the 1860s, along with hundreds of other woodblock prints flooding into the West. These helped awaken and cultivate a taste among Western consumers for all things Japanese, sparking the Japonisme movement. Vincent van Gogh described it as having a "terrifying" emotional impact. The American illustrator John La Farge became an ardent champion of Hokusai’s work in the 1860s, writing of the Japanese artist’s “unflagging power, the spirit of his vision of life… [and his] gift of fresh perception of any subject.” French painters such as Monet were captivated by these prints, and somewhat ironically, the liberal use of Prussian blue in Hokusai’s Mount Fuji series.
The prints’ brilliant colours, their stylisation of shapes, cropping techniques, and large flat areas of colour prompted some Western artists to take radical approaches to their own artistic practices. The cross-fertilisation can be seen in, for example, Henri Riviere’s Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower, an obvious Hokusai homage whereby the Eiffel Tower stands in for Mount Fuji in this series of colour lithographs. “In the Tower” zooms in on a section of the Eiffel Tower, the criss-crossing iron trusses severing and bisecting a view of the Seine far below — a charming response to to Japanese compositional approaches.
The Great Wave’s impact was not confined to the visual world. French composer Claude Debussy was a noted collector of Japanese objets d’art; the cover of the first edition of the musical score for La mer (The Wave) depicts a stylised version of Hokusai’s wave. While Debussy did not leave explicit writings about the connection between his piece and Hokusai’s waves, one can infer that they occupied a special place in his imagination.
One final note on this point: While the original context of this piece is the way the wave frames Mount Fuji, most modern (Western) viewers are more likely to notice the wave first and the sacred mountain second, revealing another way in which perceptions of the piece varied within and outside of Japan.
A shorthand for Japan, or reevaluating The Great Wave at home
For many outside of Japan, The Great Wave is the country’s representative artwork; however, this is not the case in Japan, as it was not a unique piece of art but a woodcut from which thousands of prints were made. Ukiyo-e was considered ‘low’ popular art, i.e. mass-produced for the commoners, inferior to paintings, calligraphy, and the like. Over the course of the twentieth century, Japanese artists have responded to The Great Wave in various ways. Graphic artist Yokoo Tadanori, for example, often incorporated Hokusai’s great waves into his work, but as part of crude, often lurid pastiches that parodied “traditional” Japanese aesthetics and rejected the need for European validation for Japanese art.
The reevaluation of Hokusai’s print as a touchstone in the artistic canon is a result of the noted effect that Japanese woodblock prints had on the development of European modernism, but also the more recent global popularity of anime and manga of which Hokusai’s works can be understood as an early precursor.
In more recent years, The Great Wave has been embraced — not only by the world but also by Japan itself — as a visual shorthand for Japan, particularly in the travel and tourism sphere. It appears in brochures and posters, but also on merchandise of all stripes from tea towels to notebooks. Even the Bank of Japan is not immune to the power of The Great Wave: the redesigned JPY1,000 notes released in 2024 feature it on the back, in what seems like coming full circle from the Edo-period mass-produced woodblock prints — only now, everyone has copies in their wallets. One can only wonder what Hokusai would have made of all this.
Written by Florentyna Leow