Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - The Great Wave Off Kanagawa (1831)

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa" by Hokusai is secretly incredibly fascinating.Direct link to see the art: https://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/as/original/DP130155.jpg Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, known for being art. Famous for being that wave art. Most people don't think much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why the Great Wave Off Kanagawa is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie, what is your relationship to or opinion of The Great Wave Off Kanagawa? Okay, so I do really enjoy this painting. I also have recently seen it at the, um, DC portrait gallery. There was a version of Washington crossing the Delaware done in this style with sort of the iconic wave in the background, but perhaps more iconically, uh, I went to, it seems like a difficult crossing, not to step on it. Not so easy, but perhaps more iconically, I saw it represented at a micro center where you can get all your computer parts.

And they were advertising their 3D printers and they printed out a bunch of different versions of this. There was one that was like red with like, seemed like it had like flames on it or something, but yeah, anyways, it was, it was very cool. Oh, red with flame. Wait, the printer had flames or they added flames to the wave? Well, they made the wave in like red flame color. It looked like, it looked like flame decals, but anyways. Yeah. So they printed out a bunch of different versions of the iconic wave from the painting. Yeah, I think a bunch of us, especially in modern times and internet times, are like consumers of this art. I know I had a poster of it from the first day of college poster sale, for sure.

I'm pretty sure I had a mouse pad with this on it. And then also, I think it might be a European and American thing. I tend to call this a painting, even though it is a woodblock print, which is why there are a bunch of them all over the place. But in my head, painting is visual art. That's just a thing that might slip into. To be fair, I call everything paintings. Movies are moving paintings. Water is drinkable painting. Clouds are fluffy paintings that sometimes rain smaller paintings on me. When I turned on our Zoom internet call, you said, hello, painting, to me.

And I found that strange, but now it makes sense. It all adds up. Alex is a very active painting. I'm like one of the Hogwarts ones. I talk back. Oh, it's so fun. Wacky. Yeah. And this is a very exciting topic from listeners. Thank you to J Smooks on the Discord. Jonathan, that's great. And support from X Carex, Durzo, Endrio, many others, because I think there's just a lot of excitement about it. It's our first episode about a woodblock print. It's also our fifth episode about visual art. And the other four were paintings,

American Gothic by Grant Wood, The Scream by Edvard Munch, The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh, and Dogs Playing Poker by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge. So there's a whole set of them if you want to do just the art version of the podcast. This woodblock print, The Great Wave of Kanagawa, it's by an artist that we'll mostly call Hokusai. We'll talk about him going by many names later, but for shorthand, Hokusai is the artist of this.

It was published in 1831. Interesting. Yeah, it feels more recent, but maybe that's just because I've seen it so much. Right. It feels very modern, almost cartoony in terms of how great the line work is. Right. It's so clean. Yeah, I think the internet has really run with this. It's so clean and precise and bold. There's all sorts of different fine art theories and ideas about it. Like, are the white caps of the wave claws? Is this a metaphor about Japan's relationship

with the rest of the world? There's a lot of just ideas out there about that. We'll mostly get into the history and the facts and amazing ways this art exists in the world. Is there like a lost surfer in the painting that Tom Hanks can find through x-ray imaging where we find that indeed there was a surfer in the block print that was painted over or block printed over? If folks don't have it top of mind, there are three little boats in there that are based on traditional coastal fishing boats of the time. But everybody's parodied this every way. I'm sure somebody has drawn Tom Hanks in that weird outfit squinting at it. Yeah.

Like the Da Vinci Code. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's inevitable. It's secretly about Jesus somehow. I don't know how. Well, he found.

He found. I am imagining a T posing Jesus on a surfboard riding this wave. Yeah. And we've done it. Moving on. Yeah. And again, I said 1831, I guess, is a first number. We have lots more numbers and stats about this topic.

It's a really numbers and stats heavy episode, actually. And that comes in a segment called... It's time to give some stats to give some stats and numbers to statistics. Bum, bum, bum. Statistics, statistics, statistics, statistics. Nice. That's a good one. That's a bop.

That was from Peanuts Initiative on the Discord. Thank you so much for that. We have a new name for this every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Send them through Discord or to sifpod at gmail.com. Stat songs always make me want to get up and calculate. Yeah, the first number this week is a very fun quantity. The number is two helpings of noodles. Ooh, I enjoy that. I like that. Right? Fun. Yes. It's the amount I always want, right? I've had one. Great. Not enough. And that's the approximate price of a

print of the Great Wave Off Kanagawa in Japan when it was first published and sold. It was not an expensive piece of art and there were a bunch of copies. I mean, how good are these noodles though? Yeah, good, but not like fine dining apparently. And one source this week is resources from the British Museum. They say that this was one of many artworks in a genre called ukiyo-e. And starting in the 1600s, artists used the medium of woodblock printing to mass produce all sorts of different copies of art in this ukiyo-e style. And it was popular, affordable art. It cost about the price of two helpings of noodles at a regular restaurant in Japan. Yeah, it's really hard though though, to choose because like, it's a beautiful block print, but two helpings of noodles is also really good. So that's tough. That's a tough one.

It reminds me of basically all American collectibles of pop culture or whatever. It's that thing where you see, oh, Action Comics number one, it costs 10 cents. And a bunch of people in that era bought, I don't know, a stick of gum or something instead. It's that kind of feeling when you think about the economics of it at its time. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's like I would imagine that a lot of these prints have just been lost, have been used to line bird cages or wrap gifts or whatever, because it was not that expensive. Yeah, it turns out that's true. And it's the very next numbers here. The number around 8,000 is we think how many copies were in the original run. And then we have about 100 of those copies still around. I see. So not a ton. It's partly because there were so many and they were so affordable.

People didn't necessarily treat them as something worth holding on to. Yeah. No, I mean, it makes sense. You're not going to keep every Pulp Fiction poster that you have in your dorm. So it's hard to predict what is going to become valuable in the future. Hey, want to guess what one of the other three or four posters I bought at the college poster sale was? For real? Oh, really? You had a Pulp Fiction? That was a classic.

Yeah. Uma Thurman. And I think I had the cool picture of Muhammad Ali winning a boxing match. That's the trio. Yeah. The triad. Hey, are you an 18-year-old boy at Syracuse University? That's what you buy.

That's what you do. Welcome to my one room that I share with another guy in the dorm. Yeah. Bonus points if you have the poster for Vertigo, because then you're a hipster. I did not. Yeah. I think I didn't feel like enough of a movie guy, but it was on the floor for sure. Yeah. Sadler Hall, floor two, shout out. And this run of about 8,000 copies, that's basically the amount of commercial demand for it at the time.

Lots of Ukiyo-e art got printed and reprinted to meet however many people wanted to buy it. According to researcher Kapuchin Korenberg, printmakers would make copies until the woodblocks physically ran out. Hmm. What do you mean the woodblocks ran out? Apparently, they would degrade through the many, you know, in this case, thousands of printings. Like the lines would get less sharp. And so today the prints vary in terms of their appraised value. Usually the ones earlier in the run are clearer, sharper, worth more. I see.

So like the wood is just getting mashed. It's probably wet too. So maybe it's like kind of getting smushed and mashed and the fine sort of grooves are just buckling under all the. Yeah, it's wood. Paint. Yeah, it's wood. What do you expect? Come on. Lay off.

Yeah, the way I said that made it sound like I really have a low opinion of wood, huh? I was like, you know, wood, garbage. Wood, the lowliest of materials. Tree parts, stupid, is what I think. Oh, gross. It's like tree poop. No, that's really interesting. That leaves to me, but go on.

Yeah, go on. That's interesting. So it does create a limited run of these. That's interesting. So it does like create a limited run of these. And when you have a sort of limited quantity of things that often creates a value to it, right, because it's rare. And so how long, like, I guess we will discover at what point these become valuable due to the limited run of them, but were there block prints at the time that were super valuable just because of how high quality they were, like how the quality of the block print? It's like, this is super detailed, super good. The technique is really good and crisp. So it's like five servings of noodles or something. Or was there all of these block prints generally the same price, not too expensive? It's the second thing. And this week's bonus is all about the modern value of these prints and if you could just buy one as a person.

So support the show. Stick around for the bonus. Well, I got $2. Not enough. But in their time, this entire medium, it was basically known for being affordable, reasonable. The price might vary, but this was not stuff where people said, there's only one painting of this. I'm going to buy it and hold it like a plutocrat. This was for everybody.

Art for everyone. Yeah, and it also explains a plutocrat. This was for everybody. Art for everyone. Yeah, and it also explains the size of this. The Great Wave off Kanagawa was not very big. The dimensions are 10 and one-eighth inches tall and just short of 15 inches wide. Okay, that's not big at all. In metric, that's 25.7 centimeters tall, 37.9 centimeters wide. I know fast numbers are hard to track, but it's somewhat larger than a piece of modern computer printer paper on each side. Yeah. Like add a few inches on each side and that's the size. That's surprising because all of the sort of prints of it that I've seen are huge. Like in my dorm, right? Yeah.

Yeah. It's often in restaurants too, where it's just like a whole wall is this wave. So it's like my impression of it is like this is some huge block print, but no, it sounds like it was really detailed and small. block print, but no, it sounds like it was really detailed and small. Yeah. And that's mostly because they're selling it to so many people. It's supposed to be for most people's walls and most people's homes. And so you don't make it massive. And we'll also talk later about an art book that this was featured in. So it got seen a lot more than just the 8,000 or so copies of it on its own. But the whole medium was about making a lot of copies of something for everybody in a way that didn't really get going outside of East Asia until much later in history. Yeah. So when did the block printing start in East Asia? Perfect question. The next number is the 700s AD. 700s. According to the Metropolitan

Museum of Art, that's when Japanese people began using woodblock printing. The reason for it was China and religion. Okay. The first Japanese woodblock printing was reprinting the words of Buddhist texts, just making books. And we think they got the technology and the faith from it developing in China and then spreading to Korea and Japan and elsewhere, kind of as a combined thing. Like, this is the faith, this is how you read about it and spread the word. So was literacy quite high? Like, was this to educate the masses about this religion? Yeah, relatively high. I don't have percentages or anything, but it's distinct from the thing where many centuries later, only monks are writing down the Bible.

Right. Right. This is like Gideon's Bible that you find in your hotel room. But yeah, that's really interesting. So it's like the mass printing seems like it originated because, hey, we want to teach you about this religion and this is the best way to get the word out. Exactly. And it's the origin of this art, basically, because takeaway number one, takeaway number one. The Great Wave off Kanagawa comes from more than 1,000 years of East Asian woodblock printing used to celebrate everything from Buddhism to sex work. Huh. The detail on it and the artistry of it looks kind of incredible. It's like hard to fathom that this comes from wood. Like, how do you do that?

How do you get these layers of color and the amount of detail? If I tried to do this with a piece of wood, it would look like a weird smear. Yeah, me too. Right. Like it's this technology. It got so good partly because they used it for more than a thousand years. Wow. And we're just constantly iterating slowly across culture and across a growing media of, hey, how can we make this better? That's amazing. Yeah. Just improving the technique over and over again, which I guess I don't, I mean, I know generally how block printing works. You put, you carve the image in backwards and then, you know, you smash it on some paper.

But there could also be like different blocks that you layer on, like different layers. So like one block has one layer of the painting and another block has the other layer. And then they're all the same dimension. So then you smash them on the same spot on the paper and then it creates layer of color and line work. So how did they do this process? Yeah, essentially that. It even turns out there was a specific innovation in 1765 when Japanese printmakers in 1765 came up with a new and improved way to do sort of one outline block onto a piece of paper and then use that to carve further blocks. And so you're printing now from ordered series of different wooden blocks for different shades

and colors. And that led to an explosion of new intricate coloring and shading on a wood block print. And so that was also just a few decades before this 1831 great wave. It helped inform how well shaded and colored it is. Yeah. Because it seems like this would be, you know, it's not just like you slap some paint on one block that has this carving, like it has multiple layers of color and really fine lines. So that's really interesting. Yeah, and they also were able to fund innovating this and making it better because of specific conditions in Japanese government and society.

The Buddhist just printing a book comes over in the 700s, and people do improve the technology from there. But then starting in the 1600s, the ukiyo-e genre and overall woodblock printing gets a lot better in Japan. And it's because of the specific scene in the city of Edo. In the early 1600s, Japan gets taken over by a leader called Tokugawa, who establishes a military government called a shogunate. He's the shogun, and he makes the new capital city of that the time the Edo period from the 1600s all the way to the mid-1800s. There's about 250 years of shogun rule and expansion of the city of Edo. They flatten land, they dredge marshes. And shortly after this period, a new government will rename Edo and call it Tokyo. Oh.

So this is really the origin of Tokyo being a massive city. It existed before, but that's what built it up. Okay. Was the sort of geographical region of Edo smaller than Tokyo or around the same size? It's basically just two names for the same city. Oh, okay. Cool. Like Istanbul, Constantinople is the other idea in my head.

I know that song. Or New Amsterdam, New York, which doesn't have as cool of a song, unfortunately. I don't think it has a song at all. New Amsterdam. Ah, yeah. New Amsterdam. Oh, gosh. New Amsterdam.

And then Dutch windmills dancing in the background. Yeah. Tying in. Another topic. There we go. But they're sexy Dutch windmills with legs for days. Anywho, the Edo period. Let's go.

Yeah. And this period is interesting culturally because the shogunate is a conservative military government. Okay. Right. So maybe not that fun. Not what I think, what I think of fun. But they license specific areas of Edo, later called Tokyo, for entertainment districts. And ukiyo-e artists find out that they can sell a lot of copies of pictures of the actors in these districts

and also the sex workers. Okay. Like the theaters and the brothels are both things people want pictures of. Like erotica has had a long history. I just visited Pompeii and let me tell you, they loved their smut. They loved their erotica. There was like a room that was just a locker room where people would store their clothes in the baths. And the lockers were decorated with various sex acts.

And I guess like that would help you remember which one your locker was. Like, hey, it's people doing the Eiffel Tower in there. And that's where I stored my sandals. Anyways, the point is, humans throughout our entire history have loved erotica and smut. So it's not going away, people. Yeah, it even like that kind of thing helps pioneer lots of internet technology, if not most. And it benefited this woodblock printing technology, too. That led to an explosion of funding for new prints and then reasons to improve the tech. We have a few basic instincts, eating, breathing, and procreating.

And it's no wonder that these things are highly motivating. I was hoping you were going to say like eating, breathing, and very difficultly fishing in a huge wave in your three boats. That's what people want. And boating. We must take to the water. Yeah. We must take to the water. Yeah.

And then this is really the starting point for what leads to the Great Wave print, because that commercial demand funds improvements to the technology. And then also the artists say, what if I do stuff besides actors and sex workers? Pretty much every artist in this genre, including Hokusai aside they work in a huge range of genres we'll we'll link to other hawk aside stuff he's most famous for depicting mount fuji and mount fuji is a small item in in this great wave print it is supposed to depict fuji but he drew everything from actors to ghosts to a pretty famous piece of erotica where a human woman is making love to octopuses. He really had a range as an artist. I've seen that. I am not ashamed to say it.

I have seen that image. It's, you know. Yeah. It was part of his deal. Yeah. It's something we don't associate with the wave guy. But the wave guy did that, too, because that was this whole genre, whole technology. It's the scene he was in. There are a lot of artists these days who like they do a whole range of art and commissions. And among those things, they also do smut. It's just, you know, it pays. And why not?

The internet is the maybe prime example. Yeah. It's like you do a new post, hey, my commissions are open and these are the exact limits and parameters of the erotic stuff I'll do. And then people reply. Right. Like you might be an artist who enjoys landscape painting, but someone comes along and commissions you a painting of Lightning McQueen and Mickey Mouse, getting it on now that the copyright has lapsed. And it's like, what are you going to do? Turn down $500? No. Right. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Yeah. Looking forward to the steamboat Willie erotica that's about to flood the internet.

Anyways. Anyways. Ha ha. So the Great Wave, it's printed in 1831, and it especially benefited from that 1765 advance in separate woodblocks for separate shading and colors. And then there's one other technological advance that really makes it happen. And this supported Hokusai just a couple years before he drew it. In the early 1800s, an entrepreneur in Guangzhou in China figures out a process for a specific shade of blue. And it's unclear exactly how, but they either parallel invented or reverse engineered Prussian blue. Nice.

Which had been invented about 100 years before in Berlin. A chemist named Johann Jacob Diesbach in Berlin, which was part of Prussia. That's a Prussian name. Yeah, that's interesting. So what is in it? Like crushed blueberries? I would be bad at making paint. Yeah, it's mostly made of iron.

And it was from an accident in trying to make a new red because iron is famously a reddish shade. But when iron oxidizes, it's blue. Yeah. So this guy made it by mistake and realized he was going to be very, very wealthy. And we have a whole Passif episode about the color blue in general, if people want to find out how hard people used to work to make blue. So it was a big deal to synthesize it in this chemistry industrial way. And it was very expensive, a lucrative trade secret for this

Prussian guy and other people who knew how to do it. So huge deal when somebody in Guangzhou says, I figured it out too. I'm selling it at a much lower rate. You don't have to get it from Germany. It was a big deal. Nice. That's excellent. I love undercutting those German paint makers. Yeah. Take that Ludwig von Johannes. Anyways, von johannes anyways so we got this really good rich blue made out of oxidized iron process yeah and it's beautiful it also weirdly takes a few decades to get from china to japan even though they're very close together oh interesting and it's because across the Edo period, one of the defining parts of it is that the shoguns put extremely strict limits on trade and even just general interaction with the rest of the world. Like a lot of protectionism, just cutting off trade.

Yeah, there was specific limited trade allowed with China and with Korea. And then there was one specific carve out for the Dutch at a trading post in Nagasaki. But artists wanted a lot more Chinese Prussian blue than they were allowed to get. And so especially in the late 1820s, people start smuggling blue from China into Japan, which is fun. I feel like you would get caught blue-handed a lot. It's like, is that blue paint? And it's just dribbling down. You know, like, no. Right.

I know young people are not into the TV show Arrested Development, but I'm thinking of Tobias Fuenke putting blue handprints everywhere after he tries to join the Blue Man Group and is bad at it. No, everybody likes that show because he blew himself. Right. So this starts really coming over in the late 1820s, and Hakasai uses it immediately. One of his first works with it is The Great Wave Off Kanagawa.

It was part of this being hugely popular right away in Japan before it spread to the rest of the world. Wow, look at that blue. Amazing blue he's got. Yeah. I mean, it is beautiful. I have to think then, like he was like, what is an application I can do with this nice blue that I now have? I have bought some blue. Where can I put it? A wave is blue. Let's make a big one. It is funny imagining him at the drawing board board like land, cross out, cross out. No. Sky, pretty good.

Not blue enough. Yeah, tree. Pretty good. Does tree poop blue? No, that's green. Tree poops green. And this also might have been a artwork. It's not totally clear, but there's a theory that the Great Wave off Kanagawa was made in two stages, which is that he might have drawn the

line art in the early 1820s and then updated it with the good blue several years later before publishing and sharing. Stage two, the good blue. Yeah, like I know how to draw a wave, but it's not blue enough yet. I'm going to sit on this. Right. Now, Alex, I know how to draw a wave. It's not complicated.

No, this is a very complicated wave, though. It's so intricate, yeah. It's got so many little flanges coming out of it. You're right, it does look very claw-like, but it's so artistic. And there's sea foam. How do you block print sea foam? It's so good. And there's even a thing where, as you look at Hakasai's art, he did past Mount Fuji's and even past ocean waves before.

And you can see his technique and his color blue improve a lot. And if people want to see that, we'll link a digital upload of a much earlier Hakasai print. It's from about 25 years before, but it's called Fast Skiffs Navigating Large Waves. And it's basically the same picture, but there's no Mount Fuji. The wave is less intricate and the blue is a lot duller and a lot less cool. Yeah, no, it doesn't have the same motion to it. The wave almost looks like cloth. It doesn't look like water and it doesn't have the same sort of dynamic motion. It looks sort of very still, whereas, yeah, it looks like someone, an invisible hand.

It's like a, it's like a doughy wave. It feels not move. There's not a lot of movement, whereas the later one, there's so much movement. It's so dynamic. It feels like it's flowing. There's so much movement. It's so dynamic. It feels like it's flowing. Absolutely. And so, yeah, this is an artist who he basically had this idea in his head decades before.

Waves, waves, waves, waves. Right. And, you know, all artists grow over time, but also he's part of a more than 1,000 year tradition and medium of woodblock printing. And so the tech changes and the color changes, and his art kind of got to grow as the medium grew, too, which is amazing. And you wouldn't know that from just the one print that we've plucked out of his career to make famous. Yeah, like his really early stuff was rough. Like, you know, just kind of a misshapen Naruto, uh, you know, Buffy the vampire slayer, but her eyes are too big. And the Shogun has to just be like, great, great, great job. But but yeah i'll put it on the fridge yeah yeah man look look i'm putting it up on the fridge right now trash can can we give this guy something

besides wood wood is horrible it stinks but how so how would they carve the wood they i mean I mean, obviously you have like some form of sharp thing. And the way I've seen like tools that are used to carve like modern day block printing, usually it's not wood, although that is one of the materials. There's also like a rubberish material you can use, but like, it's like a curved, it looks almost like a, like narrow spoon spoon but it's sharp so would they use things like that yeah yeah basically just little blades it's like whittling yeah right kind of whatever tools he used this was an amazing visual artist across media like we we keep clarifying this isn't a painting but he also was a painter and did a lot in that. He did a lot of sketching. He did basically every visual kind of art you can do.

Amazing. So he wasn't like specifically a master of wood carving. You know what I mean? Like it was just one of the many media he did. More about this artist, a couple quick numbers. The next number is around 71 years old. That was the age of Hokusai when he made the Great Wave print. Wow. So very, very late in life. Yeah. I mean, you know, I can kind of see the buildup of experience. Look, guys, it's never too late. It's never too late to get into wood printing. That's pretty much his actual beliefs about life, which we'll get into here because the very next number is around 50 years old, 5-0. Around age 50, Hokusai was struck by a bolt of lightning. What?

Yeah. Metaphorically or literally? Literally, yeah. Oh. Holy cow. Takeaway number two. One reason the Great Wave print exists is that its artist went through decades of personal crises after getting struck by lightning. Well.

He did this in an incredibly hard couple decades of life. I mean, God, how can it go downhill from literally getting struck by lightning? Right. The lightning was almost helpful. And then worse things happened. Yeah. It's not. The lightning was almost helpful.

Okay. What? Did he have like a bad haircut and the lightning kind of erased the evidence of it? Did he have like a bad haircut and the lightning kind of erased the evidence of it? Oh, that he has like a good version of Einstein hair where it's all sticking out? That's cool. Yeah. So one of the key sources for this episode is an amazing scholarly reference volume and book.

It's called Hokusai Beyond the Great Wave, and it's published by the British Museum, edited by Timothy Clark. They say in 1810, Hokusai went on one of many religious pilgrimages in his life. It was a 21-day vigil at a Buddhist temple. And then on his way home, he got struck by lightning and collapsed in a field and just luckily survived. Ow. I know that it is survivable to get struck by lightning. You can get these like weird scars that are, it doesn't look like a Harry Potter lightning bolt. It looks more like sort of tree branches. It's sort of these like weird branching sort of red scar marks. So yeah. Ow, though. Ouch. I laughed only because of the sudden realization that Harry Potter's scar is not really related to the events of Voldemort attacking his parents and him surviving. You would think everybody would

be like, that must be the boy who survived lightning and he'd have to clarify, you know? Yeah. Well, actually, no, it was a potent source of Nazi magic. Right. And they're like, I don't know, it looks like lightning. And he's like, I admit it looks like lightning. You're right. But the books really crumble under scrutiny. So so does the author. Just don't look too hard. Don't don't pay attention too hard. The author is Daniel Radcliffe. And don't think about the time turner at all. Don't think about it. It doesn't make sense.

So Hawkeye survives a lightning strike and treats it as an epiphany. He's like, it's time to reimagine my entire life and think about who I could be, what I could do. I feel like I would hopefully come to some epiphany after getting struck by lightning, other than like, check the weather before a hike. Not to blame them. I'm not blaming them because who thinks they're going to get struck by lightning? What if he had the wrong weather app page pulled up because he was confused about the Tokyo name change? I hate that. Yeah, and different apps give you different answers. Yeah, it's tough to avoid getting struck by lightning these days. The other thing is Hakasai liked a lot of things about his life. And so

across his entire very long life, his two biggest commitments are faith in Nichiren Buddhism and making art. He's like, I'm still going to be an artist totally, and I'm still going to have devout faith in Buddhism. Okay. But before the lightning strike, he was much more of a creative entertainer, almost showboat kind of guy in the art scene of Edo. A very lively life in that city. Really flicking his wrist when he's making his wood carvings in a kind of arrogant manner. Kind of even wilder.

He would do a lot of public stunts for making art and not really woodblock stunts. That's hard to make wild. That's hard to do. Getting wild with the woodblocks. Yeah, like whittling is pretty almost private, I feel like, you know. But he did one stunt where he did a massive portrait of a Buddhist monk's face that was more than 600 feet long. Whoa. And he used brooms as paintbrushes, like brooms for sweeping a house.

Yeah. There's also a story of Hokusai winning an art contest put on by the Shogun because the Shogun said, just bring me your best art. And Hokusai said, great. And in front of the Shogun, he paints a blue curve on a canvas. And then he takes a live chicken and dips the chicken's feet in red paint and then chases the chicken across the canvas, like running around, you know? And he says, okay, those chicken red footprints are red leaves fallen in a blue river.

That is my artwork. And the Shogun just loved the stunt so much that he won. I mean, that's... It's fun. Maybe the least embarrassing thing you can do with a chicken in an art show. So, yeah. Right, that's true. The chicken was fine.

You know, it's cool. Yeah, it's good. And he, he also would like write light verse, write popular fiction. He did a lot of illustrating for children's books. He was a very fun guy and, and approaching celebrity as much as an artist is in a conservative military society. He was like that guy that smashes the watermelons. Like, almost precisely in the sense of that guy's famous for that. Right. A lot of people were like, oh, Hokusai, the artist who does that thing, was his status. Yeah, he was socially popular and known.

You know, I can't remember the name of the guy who smashes the watermelon. Oh, Gallagher. Gallagher. Okay. Gallagher must be sort of starting to fade from the public consciousness. And I have a hard time thinking of how to explain it to someone younger of like, no, literally he was famous for, I think, telling jokes and smashing watermelons. Yeah, because we're also both younger than his time. I've only ever heard of him from older people. We're post-Gallagher, but we're not post-Gallagher enough to not feel the sort of aftershocks of the Gallagher era.

I don't know. Life is better now, I guess, is my thoughts on that. Yeah. In some ways. Because, yeah. And then the other Hakusai thing is he was known by many names and he would adopt different monikers for different artistic periods in his life. In this fun being in the city of Edo period, one of them was Gakuyojin, which means man crazy to paint. Okay. Right. It's like, I'm wild and I'm wild about art was his public vibe. I mean, it seems like he is. And it's true. Yeah. He was known among chickens as the menace. Right. The guy who irritates us, but does not necessarily eat us right away. Unclear what happened.

Right. And the name Hakusai is one he picked in his late 40s. And the name means North Studio. It was chosen to reflect a belief in Buddhism as his guiding North Star. Okay. And sort of a more spiritual period. Was that post-lightning hit? Pre-lightning, but pretty close to it. Pre-lightning. Yeah.

I see. Do we know what his OG name was, like his original little baby name was? We don't. And it's also a little murky, his exact origin. He was probably the son of a mirror maker in the court of the shogun and either a concubine or not the guy's wife. And he might've been adopted by the mirror maker rather than the biological son. So that's all a little bit mysterious, actually. Probably those silver fumes is what gave him his creativity. Legitimately, mirror making also involved a lot of illustrating, and we think that his dad was an influence on getting him into art right away. He allegedly started painting art at age six.

Wow. Okay. Which is cool. Yeah. travels, he wanders, he prays. On return to Edo, he gives the name Hakasai to his student. He says, I'm done with it. You can have it. And chooses a new name, meaning receiving the Big Dipper, as in a greater than ever commitment to spirituality and nature, and spends most of 10 years not making very much art. So was this like, did he see the lightning strike as like an intentional thing by a spiritual figure or did he, was it just more that it was the impetus for him to reflect and maybe his brain also got like supercharged with lightning and caused some, I would imagine

wild firings of neurons? It's a great question, and we don't know exactly. And he does remain an artist, and parts of his life he didn't totally abandon. So it seems like he didn't see it as a totally negative event, like the gods punishing him or something. Okay. I think that's a healthier way to look at it. Probably not a punishment, but some kind of watershed. Right. Especially because it's age 50, round number, you know? Yeah, yeah. And so after about 10 years of quiet contemplation, limited output, he renames again,

he calls himself Iitsu, which means become one, to express that he's combining his past and present selves into a new and active again artist. And that's the name he makes The Great Wave under. Okay, okay. But he's more, he's more, still more well known as Hokusai than his later name? later name? Yeah, the British Museum has quotes from the publisher's announcements when they put out these first prints, including The Great Wave, and the publisher calls him Old Man Iitsu before mentioning he was formerly known as Hokusai, and you probably know him as Hokusai. The artist formerly known as Hokusai. Yeah, there was a lot of prints becoming a symbol, sort of media telling you it's also this guy still stuff with him. Yeah. And then this prince, he does make it as part of just his journey, but also as part of a chaotic series of crises. After the lightning strike, one of his daughters dies, then his second wife dies. Then his grandson goes broke from gambling. Hakasai bails the grandson out,

but ends up going broke himself. Oh my God. And then in the run-up to this great wave print, he suffers a stroke and mostly recovers, but he increasingly depends on a daughter named Eijo as his collaborator, as somebody physically able to assist with especially the prep for setting up the studio. Man, he must have, that chicken that he dunked in paint must have secretly been like a very powerful cosmic lord. Wow. Makes sense to me.

Right. Turned and glared at him. And yeah. The chickens, remember. So it sounds like his daughter may have had like a good hand in like creating the wave print, right? Yeah. I tried to find out that. Like I was like, did she just draw it? And the consensus is he drew his wave print, but she lived with him for the rest of his life, was a constant collaborator and helper, and then was an amazing artist in her own right.

Like, it's not like he stole this from her or something, but... Yeah, no, that's... But it exists partly because of her supporting and helping and like she deserves credit in that way. Yeah, that's nice. Daddy-daughter block printing. And that led to a lot of printing. The next number here is number one out of 46, because the Great Wave print was first in an art book of views of Mount Fuji. It was initially 36,

and then it was so popular, they did a new edition with 10 more. So this also sold an entire extremely popular book with a lot of other cool views of Mount Fuji. This first one sort of starts from the ocean and the amazing wave. How many noodles did the book cost? Oh, I don't know. But it was in like regular bookstores. It was for people to buy. You got to work on your noodle conversion. bookstores. It was for people to buy. You got to work on your noodle conversion. Yeah. And this book, it was published in 1831 and it was a huge hit and helped basically stabilize Hokusai's life from there. He didn't become wealthy, but he became

able to keep working and living despite all those huge crises that had just happened. Okay. Well, I'm glad that stuff was looking up for him, at least after getting hit by lightning, having his wife and one of his children dying and going broke. Yeah, like in particular, the book drew the attention of a wealthy sake manufacturer named Takai Kozan, who became actually his friend and also a patron. Later on in 1839, Hakusai's home burned down with most of his stuff. Are you kidding me? Would the chicken spirits leave this poor man alone? He's been punished enough. poor man alone. He's been punished enough. Constant chicken. Yeah. And then Kozan helped him through that, set up a new studio in Edo for him and was also not just financially helpful, like a person he could talk to and lean on emotionally. Yeah. That's great. Look, I would love it if I had a best friend, wealthy sake manufacturer, because that sounds incredible.

Yeah. And even with that help, it seems like the biggest reason Hokusai thrived beyond his loyal daughter, beyond this loyal friend is just his mindset. For one thing, focusing on Mount Fuji, this is theoretical, but Professor Angus Lockyer of So Asked London, he thinks that Mount Fuji might have represented stillness and peace to Hokusai. Like making many, many prints of this was just a good emotional mental health thing to focus on as art. In addition to the mountain being considered one of the three holy mountains of Japan and a culturally, spiritually important place. Yeah, it's a pretty mountain. I like it. Yeah, you almost forget it's in the huge wave picture, but when you see it, you can't miss it.

And it's amazing. One of the reasons you forget it's in the wave picture is it's also blue. So it kind of blends in. Right, it really doesn't stand out, yeah. And then the other thing is Hokusai had a mindset that basically everything about him got better as he got older. That was what he believed about life and himself. After this name Iitsu in 1834, he adopts one final name, which is Manji,

meaning 10,000 things or meaning everything. He also adopts a new personal seal, which is a stylized image of Mount Fuji. And he starts telling people that like, I basically didn't know how to do art until now. And now my art is the best it's ever been. And every year after that, he just keeps telling people like, now I'm finally good at art. Like, it's so cool that as I get older, I am objectively better at this thing all of the time. I imagine him grabbing a tub of anti-aging cream and throwing it angrily to the ground, like, I don't need this. I like being old. Right. And it wasn't just, I think this is better. He thought it was objectively, he wouldn't call it scientifically, but he thought like it was fully indisputably true that he got better. When he was 88 years old, he began signing his name

with an extra character meaning 100 because he said, when I'm 100, I'll be even better at art. He also believed that at age 110, he would attain divine mastery. Like that was a peak that would happen in what he was able to do. And so just until the very end of his life, he kept drawing, kept painting. He has a legacy of more than 30,000 different artworks in all sorts of visual media. That's amazing. I love that mindset because I think that there's a lot of negativity associated with aging. Like, oh, you know, you get old and your knees give out and your brain's not as good anymore. So, yeah, I like the inverse of it.

Like, hey, you're getting a lot of experience. Like, keep on learning. Keep on improving your craft. That seems really healthy. Yeah. And you get the sense he had at least a somewhat upbeat vibe that drew people to him. His daughter, it seems like pretty happily lived with him the rest of her life. She briefly left to get married and then didn't like her husband and came back.

And when he died, a group of Hokusai's friends and old pupils combined donations to fund a coffin and a funeral and a procession, including samurai, to celebrate his life. He just lived and was crazy about painting for 90 years. That was how long he lived. Wow. I mean, it sounds like he was well-loved except by that one chicken that cursed him. Yeah, I think of the sif about Starry Night, where just kind of a lot of tough news about Van Gaas, a person keeps coming up. And Hawkeyes seems to have just been like joyful, carrying on, carrying forward, making stuff all of the time.

Like there's amazing images of tigers and dragons and Mount Fuji from the very last weeks of his life. And on that joyful note, we are going to take a break and then we'll explore some more amazing numbers about this print spreading beyond Japan. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.

Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace because yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun

or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. And we are back and the rest of the show is more stats and numbers. The next one is 1867, the year 1867. All righty. That is the year of the 1867 World's Fair in Paris.

Oh. If folks remember the World's Fair episode, Paris loves a World's Fair. They keep doing it. Was that the Eiffel Tower one? No, it was a couple decades before. That was 1889 was the World's Fair, the Eiffel Tower one? No, it was a couple decades before. That was 1889 was the Eiffel Tower. And maybe that helped because at the 1867 World's Fair, exhibitors blew people's minds with a set of Japanese woodblock prints. And this happened just a few years after the Edo government finally started loosening restrictions on trade and exports with the rest of the world.

The following year, they would pretty much collapse and be replaced by a government called the Meiji government, and an era we call the Meiji Restoration, and more openness to the world. So they finally let us see those prints. Yeah. But were these exhibited by the artists themselves or by collectors? Who was bringing these block prints to the World Fair? I couldn't find that. I wish I knew. It was probably a pavilion put on by Japan as a country. Just some guy saying, yeah, I made this. It was mine.

I did it. Yeah, I'm all these different names. Don't learn Japanese characters. That all just says my name. Yeah, I'm all these different names. Don't learn Japanese characters. That all just says my name. Yeah. Yeah, and so this amazing woodblock tradition, you know, some prints would get out at various times. But we talked on that World's Fair show about how it was sort of like the internet as a location. Like the whole world could go find out about a new thing all at once.

like the whole world could go find out about a new thing all at once. And so between that and Japan's policies, this 1867 exposition blows the world's mind, in particular French people. They're like, you mean all this art has existed this whole time, and now it's just all happening at once? Amazing. What's their feeling? Yeah. I mean, that's interesting because if you know, if you can't have that communication with another culture, it's probably pretty like amazing to get hit with that all at once. Yeah. And it set off a new trend across especially French culture. They called it Japonisme, which was just excitement about Japanese art and culture. They were like, this is a cool.

Have you heard about Japan? Yeah. Can you believe it? That's the take. That's so funny because it's so French to just take a word and then add a sma at the end. I love the great wa by Hokuswa, you know, it's just them around the water cooler. So did they copy the art style or mostly like just want to get prints of the art? Like was it about collecting the actual original artwork or did they also sort of copy the style?

It was a lot of collecting and a limited amount of imitating. Okay. You didn't have people totally just trying to replicate it and steal it. didn't have people totally just trying to replicate it and steal it. But 1867, that's a year during Impressionism and the run up to post-Impressionism. On our Starry Night episode, we talk about the Great Wave specifically maybe being an influence on that. And in general, the Impressionist movement gets influenced by the cool and bright woodblocks that they're suddenly seeing in France. I mean, it seems like Toulouse-Lautrec, his style is very bold and bright. It's not as precise, it's more loose, but still those bold, bright sort of printed colors seem like it could have

been influenced by the block printing. Yeah, especially these French guys like that. Not only were they influenced by it, but also tried to get a bunch of copies. The next number here is about 250. That was the amount of Japanese woodblock prints in the personal collection of Claude Monet. Wow. And his home is now a museum, partly because of his stuff, but also partly because they display a bunch of his cool 1860s woodblock prints from Japan. And one of the things he collected was the Great Wave. Wow, that's really interesting. I mean, Monet, yeah, it seems like, like, I'm not an art expert, but he seemed to like color, used a lot of it.

If you boil down the Great Wave off Katagawa to just cool lines and cool colors, the French were really into half of that. Yeah. They were like, colors are great. We love colors. The lines, but the colors, now there's something. Lines, I hate them. I dropped my glasses. I was like, well, that's art. I hate it. I can't stand it. I dropped my glasses. I was like, well, that's art. The next number here, jumping forward, is 2011. 2011 is the year when a massive earthquake struck the Tohoku region of Japan. Magnitude 9.0, the largest recorded earthquake in Japanese history on that scale. And it was followed by a tsunami wave within about 30 minutes and a horrible disaster. One weird footnote out of that event is that art experts had to clarify that the great wave off Kanagawa is not depicting a tsunami. That's a different kind of wave than what's in the piece. Oh, wild. Did people think that it was like predicting the tsunami

or something? A lot of people claim that it depicted a tsunami in a general way. And there was even one false claim printed in The Economist, which is usually a pretty good publication. But they claimed Hokusai drew a historical tsunami in the year 1700. None of that is true. And the picture is not a tsunami. It's probably depicting what's called a rogue wave, which is much smaller and different. It's just a cool wave. What do you want? Yeah, I think people, especially in not Japan, basically said, oh, there was a big tsunami in Japan. I know one piece of Japanese art that is a wave. So let's just make that the thumbnail, I know one piece of Japanese art that is a wave. So let's just make that the

thumbnail, you know? I only know one, and it's the octopus and the lady getting it on. So I think the octopus is a metaphor for the tsunami because the octopus is doing a sex on the lady. Because the octopus is doing a sex on the lady. Let's just put up that picture like better times are ahead. We will return to the joy that these folks feel. Yeah, I had a friend living in Kyoto when that happened. That was very scary. It was hard to get in touch with people.

Oh, yeah. It's a pretty unspeakable natural disaster. yeah so this was not the main thing people talked about but no but it is interesting that we're like yeah like oh how do we depict this natural disaster i know the one japanese art right but like the only one we all know and like. Yeah. Even though this guy drew 30,000 other things. Right, right. Yeah, so then this became a situation where both art experts and science experts would be interviewed by the media and say, no, this is not a tsunami in the picture. So maybe it's not a good representation of what happened in the world. Yeah.

I didn't think tsunamis looked like a big curvy wave that just crashes down. It's more of a large wall of water moving very fast. And experts agree. And we'll link the U.S. Geological Survey. Well, knock me down with a feather. The U.S. Geological Survey says tsunamis tend to have a taller shape and tend not to have white caps and are also just massive. Like a rogue wave is more the size in this woodcut. And rogue waves are also sudden occurrences that happen out in the open ocean, which would make more sense based on where the mountain is and where the boats are. And, you know, it makes sense. Right.

It's like what happened in The Perfect Storm, where they're like, ah, well, we're done with that storm. Whoops, no, here's another one. Yeah, pretty much. And also, in general, we don't think Hokusai was drawing an events, even though the title sort of implies it. He did a lot of his work from his imagination and not from looking at a thing in life. And so, you know, these waves happened in life, but he probably wasn't reading about it in the newspaper and then drawing it. It's just an awesome wave. Yeah, it's just cool. Sometimes an awesome wave is just an awesome wave. We have some last numbers here. I wanted like a singular number for how ubiquitous this is, and I couldn't get one. But basically, it started out as one of the most popular pieces of art in Japan, and then became a globally popular piece of Japanese art once that was revealed more to the world. came a globally popular piece of Japanese art once that was revealed more to the world.

And then it also has a bunch of different influences on other things. In 1905, the French composer Claude Debussy premiered a piece called La Mer, which means the sea, and the cover of the sheet music was just Hokusai's wave. They just took it and did that. Okay. Debussy, more like Debu copy cat. I can't think of a good insult, but man, what a copy cat. Yeah. And this print has its own poem. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a poem called Derberg, which means the mountain and describes a printmaker capturing Mount Fuji 36 times. It's

clearly describing Hokusai as a concept. Another exciting new thing with this, July of 2024. So later this year, right now, Japan's government will... Yeah, the future. Yeah. Sorry. I'm just like, wait. No, wait a minute. That's future times. All right. What's happening in the future? Hit me with it, Nostradamus. Japan's government is going to roll out new designs for paper currency. The new 1,000 yen banknote features a huge great wave. It just looks like the great wave is money.

It's really cool. That's beautiful. I wish, man, I feel like, look, I don't want to come across as an anti-American, but like our money is so boring at this point. Like it's just the same old green stuff with the same old guys, same old buildings. You're not excited about a pale drawing of a dead guy? Weird. I mean, depends on the dead guy. Yeah. Like if it was actually Washington when he was dead, like a dead Washington, that would be pretty metal. Yeah. And then one more number here, which might truly cement this wave in culture and everything else, 2008. Because in the year 2008, the Apple tech company

went a surprising way for the emoji representing a water wave. Most digital companies pick just generic wave art and Apple went with a pretty exact drawing of the great wave off Kanagawa. That's really, it's interesting that a block print that was designed to be iterated over and over again has become the ultimate in iterations, the emoji. Yeah, that's true. I think a lot of us will sometimes look at internet or merchandise versions of great art and think, oh, why is the Mona Lisa on a fanny pack and the back of shorts and some other products I'm making up, but I'm sure exist. That's a whole look, what you've got right there. Shop the look. I really went groin with my ideas, didn't I? Look, a Mona Lisa fanny pack does sound dope.

I'd like it where the zipper is like on her mouth. It looks like you're feeding her. Yeah. Yeah. Yum, yum, yum, yum. Coins. Passport. But yeah, this, this art, we're so quick to call it a painting. When I edit, I'm going to cut out one or two times. I called it a painting just to make the show smoother, but it's a prince and it was for everybody from its origin. And so I'm glad it keeps being that way. It's cool. Art is for everybody, except for one person and they knew who they are. Is this a message you're passing on from the chicken? I see. Okay. The chicken remains furious. The wrathful chicken. Look, don't humiliate chickens. Bad things happen.

Hey folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the Great Wave off Kanagawa came from more than 1,000 years of East Asian woodblock printing, used to celebrate everything from Buddhism to sex work. Takeaway number two, one reason the Great Wave Prince exists is that its artists went through decades of personal crises after getting struck by lightning. Plus, so many stats and numbers this week, including the story of the color blue being the final step of this artwork, a condensed version of more than a thousand years of Japanese history,

amazing modern iterations of this one beloved wave, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumBond.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. Some members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is a simple question. Can you buy The Great Wave off Kanagawa? You the listener, could you buy an original print of this art? Visit SIFPod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than

14 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include the book Hokusai Beyond the Great Wave, a scholarly volume from the British Museum edited by Timothy Clark. Many more essays and resources from other museums, in particular the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the MOA Museum in Japan,

and scholarly work by Dr. Hugh Davies of RMIT University, Melbourne. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skadigok people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode besides the other four SIF episodes about visual

art? Well, each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is not another art episode. It is episode 84. It's about the topic of vending machines. Fun fact, the very first vending machines in Britain either dispensed postal supplies or drugs. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artists Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode.

Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun A worker-owned network

of artist-owned shows supported directly by you