*A Mild Breeze on a Fine Day,* a woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai from the series “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji,” 1930s.

When Hokusai Met Hiroshige

In Tokyo, an exhibition brings together original works by Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige, the 19th-century masters who revolutionized the landscape in Japanese woodblock prints

By Wendell Jamieson

The exhibition “Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals” garnered worldwide attention when it opened at London’s Tate Gallery in 2025. On the same walls, the two undisputed English landscape masters went mano a mano, revealing vastly different visions and sensibilities even as they moved through the same era, even the same drawing rooms. This summer in Tokyo, at the Sumida Hokusai Museum—a small, silvery modern building, strikingly designed by the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Kazuyo Sejima—two legends of Japanese landscape have been paired in a similarly themed sumo match.