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What kind of a wave is Hokusai's Great wave off Kanagawa?

Profile image of Julyan CartwrightJulyan Cartwright

2009, … and Records of …

Abstract

The great wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai is probably the most famous image in Japanese art. It depicts three boats in heavy seas on the point of encountering the eponymous wave, while Mount Fuji is glimpsed in the distance. The print is today often reproduced as the artistic depiction of a tsunami. Did Hokusai really have a tsunami in mind when he composed this work? We examine that hypothesis together with the alternatives, by discussing the image itself and the circumstances surrounding its composition, and by evaluating the wave in terms of the fluid dynamics of breaking waves and in particular of the species termed plunging breakers, of which The great wave is a member, and conclude that it is more probable that Hokusai intended to depict an exceptionally large storm wave. There is a great deal of scientific interest at present in such abnormally high waves, which are often termed freak or rogue waves.

Figures (7)
Figure 1. The great wave off Kanagawa. How many impressions Hokusai made is not known; the various editions also show detail differences in colours and in elements of the design, as a result of wear in the woodblocks. As the original woodblock prints are more than 180 years old, the colour also varies from copy to copy according to its state of preservation; in some instances the clouds and spray are barely discernible, and the colour of the sky at the top varies from yellow to pink. (Online version in colour.)
Figure 1. The great wave off Kanagawa. How many impressions Hokusai made is not known; the various editions also show detail differences in colours and in elements of the design, as a result of wear in the woodblocks. As the original woodblock prints are more than 180 years old, the colour also varies from copy to copy according to its state of preservation; in some instances the clouds and spray are barely discernible, and the colour of the sky at the top varies from yellow to pink. (Online version in colour.)
Figure 2. Model oshiokuri in Yokohama maritime museum. As well as having oars, oshiokuri carried a dismountable mast with sails to put up in a suitable wind; they may be classed as a type of skiff. The single-oar sculling technique employed with oshiokuri was once widespread in many parts of the world,>> but today may be encountered perhaps most notably with a Venetian gondola; in fact, the Venetians had multiple crewed sculled boats similar to oshiokuri for transporting cargo. This model oshiokuri has six oars, compared with the two or four reported by Bird and the eight of the boats meeting the great wave. The outriggers on this model are much farther apart than on the boats Hokusai drew; he depicts five closely spaced outriggers—with only four in use—on the most distant boat in The great wave. Could oshiokuri have been sculled with the outriggers as closely spaced as Hokusai shows? It is not clear. (Online version in colour.)
Figure 2. Model oshiokuri in Yokohama maritime museum. As well as having oars, oshiokuri carried a dismountable mast with sails to put up in a suitable wind; they may be classed as a type of skiff. The single-oar sculling technique employed with oshiokuri was once widespread in many parts of the world,>> but today may be encountered perhaps most notably with a Venetian gondola; in fact, the Venetians had multiple crewed sculled boats similar to oshiokuri for transporting cargo. This model oshiokuri has six oars, compared with the two or four reported by Bird and the eight of the boats meeting the great wave. The outriggers on this model are much farther apart than on the boats Hokusai drew; he depicts five closely spaced outriggers—with only four in use—on the most distant boat in The great wave. Could oshiokuri have been sculled with the outriggers as closely spaced as Hokusai shows? It is not clear. (Online version in colour.)
Figure 3. Mount Fuji seen from a boat some 3 km off Bayside Marina in Negishi Bay, Yokohama, close to the probable viewpoint for The great wave off Kanagawa, but in more clement weather. If we imagine the state of the sea as in the Hokusai image, and mentally remove the development on the coast, we can see that waves could easily obscure all land except Mount Fuji, as in Hokusai’s image. (Image courtesy of Yoshio Miyajima.) (Online version in colour.)
Figure 3. Mount Fuji seen from a boat some 3 km off Bayside Marina in Negishi Bay, Yokohama, close to the probable viewpoint for The great wave off Kanagawa, but in more clement weather. If we imagine the state of the sea as in the Hokusai image, and mentally remove the development on the coast, we can see that waves could easily obscure all land except Mount Fuji, as in Hokusai’s image. (Image courtesy of Yoshio Miyajima.) (Online version in colour.)
Figure 4. The great wave off Kanagawa rescaled vertically by 30% to give Mount Fuji its natural slope. (Online version in colour.)
Figure 4. The great wave off Kanagawa rescaled vertically by 30% to give Mount Fuji its natural slope. (Online version in colour.)
Figure 6. Hokusai’s Ryakuga Haya-oshie of 1812 shows that he had an intuitive grasp of the presence of self similarity in nature that leads to what today are known as fractals. In the page reproduced here he demonstrates that drawing arcs of circles of various radii allows one to replicate the form of breaking waves and of a rabbit.** Hokusai’s Great wave off Kanagawa
Figure 6. Hokusai’s Ryakuga Haya-oshie of 1812 shows that he had an intuitive grasp of the presence of self similarity in nature that leads to what today are known as fractals. In the page reproduced here he demonstrates that drawing arcs of circles of various radii allows one to replicate the form of breaking waves and of a rabbit.** Hokusai’s Great wave off Kanagawa
Figure 7. Breaking waves. (a) A breaking wave captured at an instant not dissimilar to that seen in The great wave off Kanagawa. In the foreground it is not yet breaking; near to the surfer it is a spilling breaker; and in the background it is a plunging breaker like that in The great wave. This is a wind-produced wave much smaller than the wave depicted in The great wave, but we can see that Hokusai, working before photography, captured very well the shape of a breaking wave and had noted the way in which the wave breaks up into fingers that pinch off into drops at their tips. (b) A close-up view of a plunging breaker shows that the fingering can even produce claw-like forms similar to those in The great wave. (Online version in colour.)
Figure 7. Breaking waves. (a) A breaking wave captured at an instant not dissimilar to that seen in The great wave off Kanagawa. In the foreground it is not yet breaking; near to the surfer it is a spilling breaker; and in the background it is a plunging breaker like that in The great wave. This is a wind-produced wave much smaller than the wave depicted in The great wave, but we can see that Hokusai, working before photography, captured very well the shape of a breaking wave and had noted the way in which the wave breaks up into fingers that pinch off into drops at their tips. (b) A close-up view of a plunging breaker shows that the fingering can even produce claw-like forms similar to those in The great wave. (Online version in colour.)

Key takeaways

  • But as The great wave is almost certainly too large to be a historical tsunami off Kanagawa in Tokyo Bay, if it does show a tsunami we must consider that Hokusai is transposing an event that took place on the Pacific coast.
  • One could speculate, then, that the waves depicted in Hokusai's Great wave might represent an anecdote told to him by sailors about a tsunami seen from offshore, including in particular surviving a series of standing waves that developed on the back of a tsunami bore, either off Kanagawa or else off the Pacific coast where such waves could be much larger.
  • The alternative to a tsunami is that the wave shown in The great wave is from a storm.
  • We can glean from the image quite a significant amount of information on the season: the crew of the oshiokuri are wearing samue, so it is spring or autumn; the samue are blue, so it is probably spring although it might be autumn; and Fuji is snow-capped, with an appreciable Figure 6.
  • If the viewpoint of the image is as Hokusai sets it, near the port of Yokohama within Tokyo Bay, the wave shown in The great wave off Kanagawa is not, then, a typical storm wave; a 10-12 m wave as depicted here would be exceptional even in the worst storm.

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