Hokusai's Great Waves in Nineteenth-Century Japanese Visual Culture

Katsushika Hokusai's 1831 woodcut Under the Wave off Kanagawa, popularly known as The Great Wave, occupies an iconic place in modern visual culture. Looking at the sociocultural context in which Hokusai's iterations of this motif were first produced and consumed helps to explain why this image was singled out from the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji of which it was a part. Waves served to express a range of ideas, practices, and even materials associated with the West. Their heroic forms became critical sites for exploring Japan's shifting geopolitical circumstances, especially the country's vulnerability to foreign invasion.