Maritime Disasters and Auspicious Images: A New Look at Hokusai’s Great Wave

Abstract

Hokusai’s print known as the Great Wave, from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji, is among the most recognized works of art worldwide. Prior scholarship has addressed its production, circulation, and extensive afterlife. This paper, by contrast, enquires into what the subject actually means. Why did Hokusai make a representation of vessels in heavy seas, with a sacred mountain behind them? I question what Hokusai might have wanted to impart, and where his visual conceptualization could have come from. In this iconographic investigation, the argument will be made for the Great Wave being best understood in terms of Dutch maritime disaster painting. Such works were theological, offering the terror of death averted by some external divine intervention. Several examples were brought to Japan during the Edo period. It would not have seemed odd to Japanese viewers that ships were capable of supporting symbolic meanings. At the same time, there is no previous example of an independent Japanese depiction of ships in distress. Furthermore, Mt. Fuji offered precisely the promise of safety, its name punning on “no death.”.