Why The Great Wave is not a tsunami

No wall label calls it a tsunami. Hokusai’s own title places it out at sea off Kanagawa — Kanagawa oki nami ura, under the wave off Kanagawa — and what the boats are struggling in is weather, not an earthquake. The seismic reading arrived long afterwards, from viewers who had learnt a word Hokusai never used.

That matters because the mistake flattens the picture. A tsunami is a catastrophe arriving; this is a working morning going badly, which is a far stranger thing to have made the most reproduced image in the world.

What you are actually looking at

Three boats, not one. They are oshiokuri-bune, the fast cargo boats that ran fish into Edo, and each is crewed by men lying flat to the oars. Once you have counted the boats you cannot stop seeing them: they are the scale that makes the wave enormous, and the whole design collapses into decoration without them.

The wave’s claw of foam reaches over the boats and, from where you stand, over Mount Fuji as well. Fuji is the point of the series — this is one of the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji — and here the mountain is a small white triangle at the bottom of the frame, momentarily out-ranked by a wave that will be gone in three seconds. A sacred permanence upstaged by weather.

Your eye is at water level. Hokusai has put you in a fourth boat, just outside the frame, in the same trouble as the men you are watching.

How it was made, and why the blue matters

This is a woodblock print: a design cut into cherry blocks, one block per colour, printed by hand onto paper. The line work comes from the keyblock, carved with ridges as fine as a pen stroke, and the colour blocks are registered against it one at a time.

The blue is the reason the print looks the way it does. As the British Museum scientist Capucine Korenberg reported in 2020, the Great Wave was among the first prints in Japan to use Prussian blue — a new synthetic pigment that resisted fading, imported through China and the Netherlands, the only countries Japan traded with in the 1830s. Before it arrived, printmakers reached for indigo and dayflower blue, both markedly less vivid. The drama of a wave about to swallow three boats, delivered in a blue nobody had seen in a print before, is what made the thing sell.

And sell it did, cheaply. Korenberg notes that in the mid-nineteenth century a print of the Great Wave cost about the same as two helpings of noodles. This was not an artwork in the sense a European oil painting was. It was a commercial product, run off for as long as customers kept buying.

The picture changes as the blocks wear out

Here is the part that surprises people: there is no single, definitive Great Wave. There are many impressions, and they differ.

The British Museum holds three, the Metropolitan Museum four, Maidstone Museum one. Because woodblocks wear under the press, the differences are readable as a sequence. Korenberg’s work tracks breaks in the keyblock — three in the delicate title cartouche, one at the tip of Fuji, one in a wave on the right — and their order gives a rough chronology. An impression with crisp outlines under the left-hand boat was pulled early; one where that line has almost vanished came later.

Later still, the printmakers cut new blocks for the light blue of the sea and the yellow of the boats. They are poorer replacements: the light blue turns angular where it should curve, and parts of the boats that ought to be yellow print white. Korenberg also identified four impressions unlike any other — boats in pink, clouds in a graded dark brown — and concluded they are genuine, and the very last printings of all.

Reading. The wave has been read as a rogue or plunging wave rather than a seismic one, on the grounds that it breaks far offshore and the boats are still upright and crewed. That is a reading of the picture, not a record of an event: Hokusai left no account of what he was depicting.

Why it is everywhere now

The Great Wave became famous by being cheap, numerous, and exportable. Nobody in Edo treated these prints as heirlooms; Korenberg is blunt that owners “did not take much care of them and in most cases would end up throwing them away”, and that earthquakes and fires destroyed many more. Experts estimate perhaps 8,000 impressions were printed. Most are gone.

What survived went abroad, into the hands of European collectors and then European painters, and the image did the rest. It is now on posters, phone cases and one of the Tokyo Paralympic posters — an image so reproduced that most people meet the copy long before the print.

What isn’t known

A good deal, and the museums say so.

• How many were printed. No Edo-period records survive. The 8,000 figure is an expert estimate from how long woodblocks last, not a count.
• How many survive. Not established. Korenberg assembled photographs of 111 originals by searching museum collections, auction records, dealers, private collectors — and social media — which is a floor, not a total.
• Why the later blocks are so careless. The publisher, Nishimuraya Yohachi, had a reputation for high standards, yet the late blocks look rushed. A letter of 1836 records that he was in financial difficulty; he may have sold the blocks on, or commissioned cheap replacements. Korenberg’s own verdict is “we may never know”.
• The original woodblocks. Long lost.
• The exact date. The Met records ca. 1830–32; the Art Institute of Chicago dates its impressions 1830/33; the British Museum gives first publication as 1831. Nobody is being careless — the prints carry no date.

That last point is worth reflecting upon. The most famous image in Japanese art cannot be dated to a single year, counted, or traced to one definitive object. What you are looking at is not the Great Wave. It is a Great Wave — one pull from a worn set of blocks, in an edition nobody totalled, of a picture that was never meant to last.

Own Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave) in 4K →
See the original at The Metropolitan Museum of Art →