Photo above shows how heads of executed people were displayed in Japan’s Edo period

Maybe you’ve already accompanied Hiroshige on what the British Museum dubs ‘a lyrical journey through Edo Japan, exploring the natural beauty of the landscape and the pleasures of urban life.’ If you haven’t, and you’re planning to go to the museum’s exhibition on the artist – showcasing a new donation of 35 prints by the US collector Alan Medaugh – then this might dampen the lyricism of your visit. But it might raise your estimation of Hiroshige.

An artist, the exhibition opens by telling you, who despite living in an ‘unsettled time’, shows in his work ‘no sign of turbulence’… ‘Rather than gritty realities or exaggerated fantasies, he captured a quietly optimistic vision of his world as it might be.’

No sign here then of the famines, the oppression, ruthless censorship, persecution of intellectuals or the outlandish savagery of the penal system. Hiroshige simply turns and walks into those shadowy mountains. Its second claim is that his life was defined by ‘dedication to service’ to the shogunate. Both these claims are problematic, but to characterise thus an artist who spent his life protesting the barbarity of the Tokugawa regime is such a huge distortion of his legacy that it sends us further into a post-truth future.

The Tokugawa shogunate ruled Japan for 250 years up until 1868. It was one of the most brutal regimes of early modern times. Claiming moral legitimation from a contaminated version of Confucianism that served as a ratification of brutal authoritarian repression, it ruled by terror. It did not just suppress dissent, it erased it and it erased those who dissented. It executed a higher proportion of its civilians than almost any other peace time regime and their bodies were displayed in city centres and in execution grounds along the roads leading out of towns, a reminder of what lay in store if you chose to speak out. We mistake the silence of the ravaged archives for acceptance of these bloody realities.

Because for the many thousands of Japanese raised on a humanist Confucian education that valued suasion over punishment, that believed in the inherent goodness of humans, Tokugawa brutality was an abomination. These people sought to testify and in doing so, they did what Chinese intellectuals for centuries had done in times of oppression or dynastic collapse. They reached for the silent poetry of painting. Through visual conceits, poetic allusions and calculated ellipses, they pointed to the bloodied landscape that lay behind the ubiquitous fiction of cherry blossom. The least we can do is pay attention.

Hiroshige’s great Tōkaidō series from 1832 is justly celebrated. The ethereal light, the deep shadows, the sense of an endless journey seems to keep them perennially relevant as metaphors of the human condition. It isn’t necessarily how Hiroshige intended them. The Tōkaidō, or Eastern Sea road, started at Nihonbashi (Japan bridge) in the centre of Edo (Tokyo). It ended at Sanjōbashi (Third-avenue bridge) in Kyoto. This great open road travelled by thousands from all walks of life, starts and ends at an open state execution site. You wouldn’t know it from any of the images produced during the period, but everyone walking the road did, because they had to pass within a few meters of the fresh corpses.

The elision of these sites from the record is so systematic you realise something’s wrong. But by reading between the lines and attending to the visual cues, you become aware of small efforts to expose the hidden brutality of the everyday.

The opening image of Hiroshige’s series, one of the only scenes depicted in the full light of day, sets us just south of Nihonbashi, the centre of the shogunal realm. A daimyo procession emerges over the crown of the bridge, the fire tower, evidence for the exhibition’s curators that Hiroshige was proud of his former shogunal employment, looms behind. Where the bridge meets the road, on the left-hand side, is a group of noticeboards (kosatsu) setting out shogunal edicts. To the right, there are just a couple of dogs, one licking its paw.

Tōkaidō Leaving Edo Nihonbashi Credit Line Wikimedia Commons.jpg

This is actually a calculated synecdoche. A couple of feet further back, out of sight, severed heads of criminals executed in the nearby Kodenmachōgaol were displayed. This was the Nihonbashisarashiba, or public shaming place. And if it wasn’t a fully severed head, it was a partially severed one. A victim was placed in a box and the box buried in the earth, leaving the head exposed. The attendant executioner made slow cuts into the neck with a bamboo saw. There’s a Western eyewitness account of the practice at Nihonbashi from as late as 1864, or you can read it in the tell-all account by a former Kodenmachōgaol executioner published in 1893.

Hiroshige’s dogs are there because it’s a human blood fest. In fact, when you look again, you see that there’s another kosatsu just behind the dogs. If you could read it, and it’s deliberately illegible, it would tell you the name of the criminal, their address, and their crime.

It’s only when the regime falls, that the dirty details emerge, but even then, they are quickly suppressed as Japan tidies up its image to take its place amongst the Great Nations. Because of an irony of history, because of the helter-skelter modernisation of the post-Tokugawa Meiji period, the darkness of the Edo period never fully comes to light.

The second station of the Tōkaidō, after you’d left Edo, was Shinagawa. A hundred meters down the road from Shinagawa, you reached Suzugamori, one of three execution sites in Edo. Between one and two thousand people were executed here each year. If you were lucky enough to be beheaded, your severed head was displayed for three days and two nights on a trestle. If you were crucified, which meant being strapped to a tall post, your legs splayed, and your entrails gradually pulled out by hooked spears, your body similarly remained displayed in situ for three days. Everybody who travelled the Tōkaidō road passed in front of these mutilated corpses and severed bodies. But you won’t find a single Edo period reference to it. You can’t even find it on contemporary maps. You’d think it didn’t exist.

In fact the references are there, but allusive and oblique. In a book ostensibly devoted to Edo specialities that Hiroshige publishes around 1850, for example, he pictures Suzugamori from across the bay, looking north. The rooftops of Shinagawa are to the near right, while Suzugamori extends down the coastline into the distance. It’s not labelled and there’s no suggestion of the row of crucifixes that studded the ground behind the pines. Instead, you’re forced to view the coastline through the foreshortened boat masts that slice up the foreground. It’s a visual conceit: the masts, with their triangular rigging, are correlates of the crucifixes across the bay.

L From Ehon Edo miyage © The Trustees of the British Museum.jpg

R Tokugawa bakufukeijizufu Credit Line National Diet Library Digital Collection

You could play the game of visual conceits in all sorts of ways. In fact it helps to see it as a kind of iterative meming. Consider for example, Hiroshige’s print of the slopes of Kawasaki, one of the Tōkaidō stations. The snow-blanketed dwellings are ghostly, the silence is uncanny, three peasants struggle through the snow, their eyes shrouded. Let’s take it at its simplest as a landscape of toil or hardship – there’s no doubt the figures somehow elicit our empathy.

Five years later, Hiroshige’s friend Kunisada revisits the image. He replicates the snowy landscape, but in the foreground he superimposes the figure of a richly dressed woman sitting on an ox with a golden harness. The purple cloud indicates she belongs to a separate picture space. She nonetheless looks back towards the two peasants across the divide, with a mocking smile.

L Tōkaidō 14th station Yoshiwara Credit Line Wikimedia Commons R A View of Kambara Credit Line Bequest of John H. Van Vleck.jpeg

It’s a facetious reference to the eccentric medieval priest BotanShōhaku, who loved beauty so much he painted the reins and the horns of his ox gold. People knew the reference, because it featured in children’s books. BotanShōhaku is a cipher for thoughtless aestheticism, reckless expenditure, dissociation from the times. Japan at the time was emerging from the great Tenpō famine (1833–37). The visual montage sets up a metaphor of a government that spends vast sums on pageantry but is out of touch with its people and their suffering. He wasn’t so much painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa, he was saying the moustache was always there. It may not seem very much in terms of resistance. But for those living under a regime of systematic epistemic violence, when you could not name your truths, the coded messages of popular print culture allowed you to reclaim your mind. You clocked another meme, and you knew you weren’t alone.

No surprise then,  that Hiroshige’s still lives and bird and flower prints were not the simple celebrations of the natural world the exhibition would have you think either. Like the Ming academic painting they drew on, they concealed allegories of (mis)government. His dead fish prints aren’t displayed here, but they offer an insight into the darkness of his preoccupations. The fish are trussed up as sashimi on bamboo leaves and branches of nandina etc., but the accompanying poems make it clear that they’remetaphors. (For example, ‘The brush that paints my pictures may be whimsical, but don’t think I’m talking about the exquisite taste of these fish’.)Another of the poems reads,

The opening cut of the knife – partially sliced sashimi – and, for garnish, a stupidly moss-encrusted salted bream from the ocean

Sea Bream © The Trustees of the British Museum.jpg

Salted bream is shiotai. A salted body is also shiotai. Those that inconveniently died during torture – for example, by slices to the neck as they were buried shoulder deep in earth (the partial slicing) were salted, so they could then be taken to taken to the execution ground and re-executed. Salted bream from the ocean is ‘oki no shiotai’. Oki no shio, reversed, becomes shioki no – which is the execution ground. The stupidly preserved, then, the bizarre introduction of moss into the picture – is ridiculing the sadistic practice of salting corpses so the state can take its full revenge. And the opening cut of the knife? A salted body is softened, it’s easier to cut. It’s good practice for beginners. It’s all set out in the shogunate’s disciplinary procedures published by an ex-executioner in the early years after the fall of the Tokugawa.

So why are we presented in the exhibition with Hiroshige, painter of picnics under the plum blossom (his plum blossom sites, by the way, Gotenyama and Kamada, are located either side of Suzugamori execution ground)? It’s symptomatic of a fixation in the scholarship of the period with the ‘floating world’ of Edo, a kind of Disneyfied nostalgia for its arts, crafts, theaters and brothel districts. And dissent isn’t popular with art critics.Jonathan Jones panned the British Museum’s ‘I Object’ exhibition back in 2018.Of the ‘ravishingly beautiful’ 14th-century Chinese painting called ‘The Fascination of Nature’, he wrote, ‘we’re told its creatoris commenting on the destruction of China’s culture by the Mongol invaders in his richly observed depiction of insects and amphibians preying on vegetation. All I can see is a marvelous portrayal of nature.’

Moroever, the British Museum’s Hiroshige exhibition has a special message for us.‘In the agitated 1870s [the shogunate has fallen, the emperor has now been reinstated as a puppet leader, but the country is in profound disarray] Hiroshige’s work showed Japanese artists that they could depict modern life selectively and with the composure of a friendly observer rather than as enmeshed participants.’ The ‘composure of a friendly observer’ rings alarm bells. It was presumably with ‘the composure of a friendly observer’ that Colleen Shogan, Archivist of the United States, recently oversaw the deletion of references in permanent exhibit galleries at the National Archives to Indigenous land displacement, the removal of Dorothea Lange’s photographs of Japanese-American concentration camps, and the deletion of references to the camps from educational materials.It’s ‘the composure of a friendly observer’ that permits the atrocities of the past and the atrocities of the present to be erased before our eyes. The least the Hiroshige exhibition could have done was to say, ‘It happened then too.They knew. They grieved.They tried to send us a message in a bottle.’

Edo artists sought to testify to the darkness of their worlds, to the experience of life under a brutally authoritarian regime. We haven’t served them well in perpetuating myths of oppression. It’s probably time to wrest this vast archive of hidden testimony from the cheerful historians who have dominated it for so long, and to attend with empathy and intelligence to these urgent messages written in what is now an only partially decipherable language. Because, if we have any kinship with the past, it still matters.

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