Katsushika Hokusai

Archive Note

Katsushika Hokusai lived from about 31 October 1760 to 10 May 1849, a Japanese ukiyo-e painter and woodblock printmaker of the Edo period. The term ukiyo-e means "pictures of the floating world." He was born in the Katsushika district of Edo, now Tokyo, with the childhood name Tokitaro, and trained in the studio of the ukiyo-e master Katsukawa Shunsho. Over an exceptionally long career he produced an enormous body of paintings, prints, and illustrated books.

Hokusai used many art names across his life, a documented habit even by the standards of the period. From roughly 1834 he signed as Gakyo rojin Manji, often translated "the old man mad about painting." Beginning in the mid-1810s he issued the Hokusai Manga, multi-volume sketchbooks of figures, animals, landscapes, and studies. The word manga here means "sundry sketches," not the modern comic. He helped shift ukiyo-e away from its earlier concentration on courtesans and kabuki actors toward landscape and nature as primary subjects.

What made him distinct, for tattooing, is that he matters through two specific works rather than through a body of warrior imagery. The first is Kanagawa oki nami ura,"Under the Wave off Kanagawa," known in English as "The Great Wave off Kanagawa." It is the opening print of his series Fugaku sanjurokkei, the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, published from the New Year of 1831 onward and commonly dated around 1830 to 1832. By one account the date is given variously as 1831, late 1831, or around 1830 to 1832; the series rolled out over a span, so individual impressions cannot be pinned to a single day.

The craft of the Great Wave is a synthesis. The print joins traditional Japanese composition with European-derived graphical perspective, and it made notable use of imported Prussian blue pigment. Its clawed, cresting wave became, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the single most-copied reference image in Western wave and ocean tattooing. That migration onto skin is a function of the image's global fame rather than of any documented Edo-period tattoo practice tied to the print. The work circulated widely in Europe during the late nineteenth-century vogue for Japonisme and influenced Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters.

His second tattoo-relevant work is Tako to ama,"The Octopus and the Diver," better known as "The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife." It is a shunga, or erotic, design that appears in the three-volume book Kinoe no Komatsu,"Young Pines," published in 1814. The design depicts an ama, a female shellfish and pearl diver, entwined with two octopuses. It is Hokusai's best-known erotic work and is frequently cited as an early forerunner of the tentacle-erotica motif later popularized in twentieth-century Japanese manga and animation. It remains a recurring reference point for octopus tattoo iconography, both for the rendering of the creature and for its erotic and oceanic associations.

The load-bearing point in the owner's vault is the distinction from Utagawa Kuniyoshi. Kuniyoshi's Suikoden series invented the tattooed-hero archetype and seeded the irezumi motif vocabulary directly. Hokusai, by contrast, contributes two discrete, world-famous images that Western tattooers later adopted. His tattoo relevance is image-specific, not figure-specific, and the claim that the Great Wave shaped Edo-period tattoo practice is not asserted; its pull on tattooing is modern and reference-driven.

Hokusai died in Edo on 10 May 1849. Impressions of the Great Wave are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession 45434, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, among others. The line from his two prints runs not through a school of tattooers but through the global circulation of two images that modern artists still copy.

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