It is not yet light. You are the surishi — the printer — in the workshop of Nishimuraya Yohachi, whose shop sign reads Eijudō. On the bench in front of you lie seven cherrywood blocks, carved on both sides. Nobody has ever pulled this print before. In about two hundred years it will be, by most counts, the most reproduced image ever made by a human being. This morning it is just a job.
You are going to make this print the way it was really made: mix the blue, register the paper, rub the baren, and pull eight impressions from seven blocks — one colour at a time — until the wave stands up out of the paper.
Everything you see here is drawn from scratch in code — a hand-coded interpretation of the print, not a photograph of it — so you can take it apart layer by layer.
Around 1706, in Berlin, a colour-maker named Johann Jacob Diesbach was trying to cook up a red — a crimson lake made from cochineal insects. He borrowed potash from the laboratory of the alchemist Konrad Dippel, who distilled animal oils and bone. The potash was contaminated. Diesbach's red came out blue. Not a pale blue: a deep, ferocious, unstoppable blue.
A century later it reaches Japan through Dutch and Chinese traders at Nagasaki, where printers call it bero-ai — “Berlin blue.” At first it is far too expensive for a cheap street print. Around 1829 the price collapses, and suddenly a publisher can afford to build a whole series around it. Which is exactly what Eijudō does.
Here are the three blues on your shelf. Drag the slider to send them through a hundred years of sunlight on a shop wall.
At zero years all three look magnificent. That is the trap.
This is why the wave is still blue. Hokusai's printers did use the fugitive colours too — the pink clouds and yellow boats in most surviving impressions have quietly faded to nothing. The sea survived because of a spoiled batch of potash in Berlin.
No press. No machine. A Japanese print is made by laying damp paper onto an inked block and rubbing the back of it with a baren — a coil of cord inside a bamboo-sheath disc that fits your palm. You do it once per colour, and the paper has to land in exactly the same place every single time or the wave gets a shadow.
That is what the kentō marks are for: a notched corner (kagi) and a straight edge-stop (hikitsuke) cut into every block. Line the sheet up, and eight separate colours land on top of each other within a hair.
Colour order is taken from the British Museum's technical study of 111 surviving impressions: at least seven blocks, eight printing steps, two of them dark blue — one for the outlines, one for the deep water.
This is a cheap popular print, sold from a street stall for roughly the price of a bowl of noodles. Eijudō does not want one wave. Eijudō wants thousands. And cherrywood, no matter how hard, is not forever.
In 2020 a scientist at the British Museum, Capucine Korenberg, put photographs of 111 surviving impressions side by side and found the cracks — tiny breaks in the title cartouche, a split across Mount Fuji's slope, a snapped line in the wave — always appearing in the same order. That gave her something nobody had before: a chronology. Scrub the wheel and watch the blocks die.
All artwork here is drawn in code as an original interpretation of a public-domain print. Facts drawn from the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and published pigment research.