Arai, from the series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi)," also known as the Tokaido with Poem (Kyoka iri Tokaido)

This woodblock print depicts Arai, the thirty-first station along the historic Tōkaidō road that connected Edo (Tokyo) with Kyoto during Japan's Edo period. Created as part of Utagawa Yoshimori's series "Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō," this print belongs to a tradition made famous by Hiroshige's earlier masterworks. However, there's an intriguing puzzle here: the artwork data lists 1832 as the creation date, but Yoshimori was born in 1830, making him only two years old at that time. This print more likely dates from the late 1830s or early 1840s, when Yoshimori would have been an emerging artist working in the shadow of the great Tōkaidō series. Arai was particularly notable as a checkpoint town on Lake Hamana, where travelers had to cross by ferry or along a causeway, making it a dramatic subject for artistic interpretation. The chuban format—smaller than the standard oban size—was popular for series that included poetry (kyoka), allowing collectors to acquire complete sets more affordably. Yoshimori's body of work shows he was fascinated by both traditional Japanese subjects and the foreign presence in Japan during the opening to the West, creating numerous prints of Yokohama's international district and Western ships.