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Kuniteru gave the engine a flared chimney and a pale green cab. Japan ordered its first engines from British factories in 1871. Many print designers drew them from Western pictures rather than from life.

Japan had been open to the world for less than 20 years when its first railway ran, and the speed of the decision is the story. The Tokugawa order fell in 1868. By 1870 the new Meiji government had borrowed money in London, hired a young British engineer named Edmund Morel to run the work, and started laying track. On 14 October 1872 the line from Shimbashi in Tokyo to Yokohama opened, with the emperor aboard. He was 19. The trip was 29 kilometres and took 53 minutes. On foot it had been a long day. Morel did not see it. He died of tuberculosis in Yokohama in 1871, at 30, and is buried there. The stretch this print shows, along the Takanawa shore, was built where it was because the government could not get the land. The army and the old domain estates along the coast road would not sell their waterfront. So the engineers took the line off the shore and laid it on a bank of stone out in Tokyo Bay, sea on one side, city on the other. Passengers rode over open water for 2.7 kilometres because the men who owned the shore said no. Landfill buried the embankment and everyone forgot it. Then in 2019, digging for a new station at Takanawa, crews hit 770 metres of the original stonework, and Tokyo argued about how much of it to save. This is a kaika-e, an enlightenment picture, and they sold in huge numbers: the new telegraph poles, the new bridges, the new steam. Utagawa Kuniteru II laid it out as a procession. The train runs along the bottom in scarlet carriages. On the road above it goes the traffic it was replacing: a horse cab, a rickshaw, people walking out to look. Many print designers of the period had never seen a locomotive and copied Western illustrations, giving Japan a decade of prints with plausible but wrong engines. The best-remembered detail of the opening months is a matter of etiquette. Passengers did what any sensible person did before stepping onto a clean floor: they left their shoes on the platform at Shimbashi, and arrived in Yokohama to find nothing to put on. The railway printed notices. Within 30 years Japan was building its own locomotives.