Asakusa Kinryuzan

What the heck. There's a fair amount of snow on the ground in Toronto, Canada - so let's look at a piece of Japanese art showing snow, too.

This is an ukiyo-e woodblock print done by Hiroshige Ando (artistic surname first) created first in 1856.

Known as Asakusa Kinryuzan, and #99 of the incorrectly named One Hundred Famous Views Of Edo (there are 119), it shows the Kinryuzan Temple in Asakusa, a very famous old temple in Tokyo, the so-called modern name of Edo, Japan's capital.

The Buddhist Kinryuzan Temple in Asakusa is dedicated to the Bodhisattva Kannon.

This is a lovely piece, mostly because I like snow scenes in Japan. From the comfort of my warm room, of course. While crowd in the scene is less intense that what we would have seen when there isn't snow, these folks are always using the grounds for fairs, or to mark the New Year... actually, it is used to mark the END of the year.

We see the Niomon (Gate of the Two Guardian Kings) and the pagoda in the background as we look through the Kaminarimon (Thunder Gate) peeking through on the left of the art, and the huge paper lantern (all still seen in 2013) hanging from above.

Apparently, the large black ink kanji on the globe denotes its donors... the Shinbashi.

What is very cool about this drawing, is not necessarily the snow, but the shadow of the Thunder Gate... see that pale blue glow near the bottom center of the page? The shadow implies 'silence', standing in sharp contrast to the temple's visitors wearing hats and/or using umbrellas to keep the snow off their heads as the walk towards the Niomon hidden behind the snow-covered trees...

Hiroshige was commissioned to capture this view after the pagoda had been restored following a huge earthquake the demolished a year earlier n 1855.

Cheers
Andrew Joseph