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A British-built engine drawn by a man who had probably never seen one. The kaika-e print trade ran ahead of the machinery it advertised.

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 as chief engineer, and started laying track; on 14 October 1872 the line from Shimbashi in Tokyo to Yokohama opened with the 20-year-old emperor aboard. Twenty-nine kilometres, 53 minutes, a journey that had been a long day on foot. 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 holdings along the coast road would not give up their frontage, so the engineers took the line off the shore entirely and laid it on a stone embankment out in Tokyo Bay, a causeway with the sea on one side and the city on the other. Passengers rode over water for two miles because a landowner said no. The embankment was buried under a century of landfill and forgotten, and then in 2019, digging for a new station at Takanawa, construction crews hit the original 1872 stonework and Tokyo had an argument about how much of it to save. Prints like this one sold in enormous numbers as kaika-e, pictures of enlightenment: the new telegraph poles, the new bridges, the new steam. Utagawa Kuniteru II laid the whole spectacle out as a procession, the train along the bottom with its scarlet carriages, and above it on the road the traffic it was replacing, horse carriage, palanquin, rickshaw, people walking 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.