The Great Wave is not called The Great Wave. Its title is 神奈川沖浪裏, Kanagawa-oki Nami Ura, which translates as "under the wave off Kanagawa".
That last character, 裏, means under, or behind, or the reverse side of something. It is where the name of our 裏 editions comes from: the Katsushika Hokusai 裏 Edition and the Seán Seachtain 裏 Edition. I did not pick it because it looked good, though it does. I picked it because it is the word Hokusai's publisher put on the print in 1831, and if you are going to make a version of something you should at least know what the original was called.
A few other things I learned while working on these that I did not expect.
It is a print from a set, and the set outgrew its own name
The Great Wave is one image out of a series called Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which Hokusai made between about 1830 and 1832, in his seventies. It sold well enough that the publisher added ten more prints, so the set called thirty-six actually has forty-six in it. He apparently wanted to take it past a hundred and never got there.
So the most famous image in Japanese art is one of thirty-six in a series that outgrew its own title. There's something reassuring about that if you have ever worried about naming a collection before you know how big it is.
The blue is European
This is the part I keep telling people about. The deep blue that makes the wave look like the wave is Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment invented in Berlin. In Japan it was called bero-ai, from "Berlin". It had only recently become cheap enough to import when Hokusai used it, and the whole series is built around it.
The most recognisably Japanese image in the world is partly the result of a German chemical arriving in Edo at the right moment. I find that genuinely useful to know, because 5C5V is a Japanese-inspired brand run out of Copenhagen by someone who is not Japanese, and I have thought a fair bit about where that sits. It turns out the borrowing runs in every direction and always has. Hokusai took a pigment from Europe. Van Gogh took Hokusai. Nobody was asking permission.
It was mass-produced merchandise
Around a thousand copies were printed in the first run. Estimates put the eventual total around eight thousand. These were woodblock prints made to be sold in quantity to ordinary people in Edo. Ukiyo-e means pictures of the floating world, and the floating world was the entertainment district. This was popular commercial art, closer to a poster than to a painting.
Of those eight thousand, about a hundred and thirteen first-edition impressions are known to survive.
I think about that number a lot. Eight thousand made, a hundred and thirteen left, and the survivors sit in climate-controlled cases at the British Museum and the Met. The thing that was cheap and disposable became the thing that is priceless, purely by outlasting everything else.
Which is why I don't feel bad about putting it on a shirt
There's a reflex that says putting a famous artwork on clothing cheapens it. I understand the reflex. I do not think it survives contact with what this particular artwork actually was.
Hokusai made a commercial print, in volume, for a mass market, using an imported industrial pigment, for a publisher who kept extending the series because it sold. Reproducing it on a garment made in volume for a mass market is not a betrayal of that. It is roughly the same activity with different machinery.
What would be a betrayal is doing it lazily. Cropping it badly, flipping it because it fits the print area better, sticking it on a shirt with no idea what the title means. That happens constantly and it is the actual disrespect, not the t-shirt.
What we did with ours
The two 裏 editions are homages, not reproductions. Working from the original composition, reduced to what survives at garment scale, in a palette that sits with the rest of the Edo Collection rather than fighting it. The 裏 in the name is there so that anyone who reads Japanese knows I looked the title up.
If you want to see the originals properly, the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum both have impressions online in high resolution and it costs nothing to look. They are better than any photograph of them suggests. The wave is much smaller than people imagine and Mount Fuji, which is the actual subject of the series, is a tiny triangle in the middle distance that most people never notice is there.
Keep reading
- The Edo Collection: what's on each shirt, and what it means
- New in the Edo Collection: the Shōgun 将軍 tee
- Why Edo? The thinking behind the Edo Collection
Written by the founder of 5C5V. I design every collection from Copenhagen, built around five Japanese cities and the virtue each one stands for. Questions about a design, sizing or an order? Email matthew@5c5v.co.uk. It comes straight to me. More about 5C5V.
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