Cats Suggested as the Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō

Utagawa Kuniyoshi loved cats. He kept many, drew them constantly, and produced dozens of woodblock prints of them. This one is his masterpiece of feline satire: 55 cats arranged across the sheet, each representing one of the 53 post stations of the Tōkaidō highway from Edo to Kyoto plus the start and end points. The joke works because each cat's pose or activity puns on the syllables of a town name. Modern Japanese speakers still work through the puns as a game. Kuniyoshi drew this to bypass a Tokugawa ban on prints of courtesans and kabuki actors. Cats were legal. Now at Ota Memorial Museum of Art, Tokyo @ota_memorial_museum