We are pleased to present our latest exhibit: Spring in (Edo x Tokyo) 2024

Spring is perhaps the season that best defines Japan, in no small part due to the fleeting beauty of the cherry blossoms that blanket the country in beautiful shades of light pink. For centuries, people in Tokyo have celebrated the arrival of spring by gathering under the cherry blossoms with their loved ones. Cherry blossom viewing is one of the practices that has defined urban life in Tokyo for centuries.

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Before being renamed Tokyo in the late 19th century, the city was known as Edo. Just as today, Edo was a vibrant capital, with streets lined with stores selling all sorts of trinkets, food stalls, street performances, and itinerant priests. The political center of Edo was the area around Edo Castle, where the samurai rulers took residence and watched over the entire country. Today, the site of the Imperial Palace, this area remains home to the vibrant and dynamic district of Marunouchi.

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Partaking in the urban lifestyle of Tokyo, one sometimes wonders what people walking on these same streets may have been up to in the past. Luckily, woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) often contain depictions of urban life and thus serve as a repository of the urban landscape of the past.

But it is not only ukiyo-e that binds us to the past of this grand city. Eizo Kinoshita is an architect and painter who gained popularity when his paintings of Edo Castle and Kanda were serialized in the metropolitan edition of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper for five years starting in 2010.

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