The Great Wave is not about the wave

Under the Wave off Kanagawa is the first print in a series called Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. The mountain is in the picture. It is the small white triangle in the middle distance, below the wave’s crest.

Once you have seen it, the composition reorganises. The crest of the wave and the peak of Fuji rhyme — same angle, same white. The wave is temporarily the bigger of the two, from where you happen to be standing. That is the joke, and it is a joke about scale and permanence rather than about danger.

The boats

There are three. They are oshiokuri-bune, fast boats used to run fresh fish into Edo, and there are eight rowers crouched in each. Most reproductions crop them or lose them in the trough. They are the reason the print has stakes.

The blue

The deep blue is Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment newly imported into Japan and cheap enough to use in quantity for the first time. That availability is a large part of why this series looks different from the ukiyo-e that came before it.

A note on impressions

Thousands of sheets were pulled from the same woodblocks, and the blocks wore down. Early impressions have crisper outlines and a stronger gradation in the sky than late ones. When a museum describes an impression as “early”, that is what they mean.