From the Sumida Hokusai Museum and Sumida City.
Hokusai was born in 1760 near Honjo Warigesui, in today’s Sumida City, Tokyo. It is said that his childhood name was Tokitaro.
He became interested in drawing at about the age of six, is said to have worked at a book-lending shop at about twelve, and later worked as a woodblock carver.
In 1778 he became a pupil of Katsukawa Shunsho and appeared in the ukiyo-e world under the name Katsukawa Shunro. He left the Katsukawa school in 1794.
He then used the name Sori and created his own style. From 1804 he worked hard on book illustrations, using only black ink with light gray shading.
As more people across Japan wanted to learn his way of drawing, he made picture books to copy from. The Hokusai Manga, now famous around the world as the “Hokusai Sketches”, was started in this period.
In this time he made many famous color prints, such as the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, and pictures of flowers and birds.
Before this, ukiyo-e had no genre of what we now call landscape pictures. Making landscape a genre of ukiyo-e, through the huge success of the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, is one of Hokusai’s great achievements.
In One Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (1834), Hokusai wrote that if he kept working until he was over a hundred, he might be able to draw pictures that seem alive. In his later years he used the name Manji, and he worked until 1849.
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