By Ferry to Factory

Ferries crossing a river represent a link with a past era. They cross time as well as a spatial divide. The ferries that crossed Tokyo's main river, the Sumida, once known simply as the Great River (Ōkawa), represented collectively a cultural landscape that was in the throes of abrupt change. At the same time, each stood in its own way for a different era, having differing associations and resonances, imbued with different topographical references. No artist would think of depicting the Hashiba ferry without some pictorial reference to white sea birds. The Takeya ferry evoked the amorous license of the late Tokugawa period. The ferries at the mouth of the river, the offspring of an industrializing city, came later to symbolize the early years of industrialization, before the construction of bridges and the filling-in of canals. The writers in whose works the ferries figure most prominently are people like Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927), whose sensibilities were nourished by a deep attachment to a cultural landscape undergoing a wrenching process of change. ¹ Like the print artist Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847–1915) a few decades previously, they sensed in the ferries a whole jumble of meanings from which they were steadily being forced away.