The Japanese title says nothing about a tsunami. It says: under a wave off Kanagawa. Two researchers measured the wave against the boats beneath it, put it three kilometres offshore and around ten metres high, and concluded in a Royal Society journal that it is a rogue wave — a storm wave at the point of breaking.
Thirty men, and none of them drowning
There are three boats. They are oshiokuri-bune, fast barges built to run live fish from the peninsulas into the markets at Edo, and they were the delivery vans of the bay. Eight rowers each and two relief crew, so thirty men are in the picture, of whom twenty-two can be seen.
They are crouched low along the hulls and holding on, which is what you do. Nobody has gone in and nobody is waving for help. These were working boats on a working day, and the crews had made the run before.
The small pale triangle down in the trough, with snow on it, is Mount Fuji. That is the whole point of the picture: it belongs to a series called Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, which ran in the end to forty-six prints, and every one of them has the mountain in it somewhere. Here it is the smallest thing on the sheet, sitting in the gap the wave has opened. The mountain is the subject. The wave is the weather.
The old man who kept changing his name
The signature on the print reads: Hokusai, changed his name to Iitsu. He used more than thirty names across his working life, and this one is a handover note left on the paper — the name everybody knew, and then the name he was using now. He was around seventy when he drew the wave, and he had been drawing for sixty of them.
In the preface to a later book he wrote that nothing he made before the age of seventy was worth counting; that at seventy-three he had begun to understand the structure of birds and animals; and that by a hundred and ten every dot and every line of his would be alive. He died at eighty-eight, still working, having given himself another twenty-two years.
It was never a painting
It is a woodblock print, published in about 1831 by Nishimuraya Yohachi. Hokusai drew it; a block-cutter cut the blocks and a printer pulled the sheets, and neither of them signed anything.
The colour is the reason it exists at all. Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment imported from Holland from 1820 and arriving in quantity in 1829, held a deep blue that the older Japanese blues faded out of within a few years on a wall. The series was launched to show off the new colour, and it is why the print looks the way it does — two blues doing nearly all the work, and the paper left white for the foam.
About a thousand sheets went out at first and something like eight thousand were pulled in the end, until the blocks wore down and the lines went soft. Of that first edition, 113 impressions are known to survive.
It was made to be printed in thousands, so here is another printing. One hundred and thirteen of the first ones are left.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.