Hokusai's Tiger and Dragon

Katsushika Hokusai(1760-1849)was one of the best known Ukiyoe artists. Readers are now seeing his Tiger on the left, and the Dragon on the right, hanging side by side. This was at an exhibition at the Ota Memorial Museum of Art, Tokyo, early in 2007. The tiger and the dragon are symbols of two equally strong powers, and as such have been painted by quite a few famous artists. But in Hokusai's case there were additional factors which made the exhibition exciting. These two were long separated, and it was only a few years earlier that the Dragon was discovered by the National Giumet Museum of Eastern Art in Paris. The crucial point in identifying the Dragon as Hokusai's was that, whereas hitherto it was not clear what the Tiger was roaring at, it was now established that the two were exactly looking at each other. Another thing was that it was also made clear that Hokusai drew these two pieces almost at the same time, at the age of 90-part of the signature on both reads 'by a 90-year old man'-and died soon afterwards.

Although the dragon is imaginary, and the tiger was never found in Japan, both are well-known and popular here. One folk tale goes that when an old couple got a cat and decided to keep her, they wondered how to name her. "A tiger is a very strong animal, so let's call her tiger". "But when we talk of the tiger and the dragon, we put dragon first. It should be dragon." "The dragon is blown off by a wind." "The wind is withstood by a wall." "A mouse makes a hole in the wall." "And the cat catches a mouse." So the old couple named their cat a cat.

There are some who maintain on the basis of the place of Hokusai's signature that the two should be hung the other way round, meaning that the signatures are normally put on the outside of the pair of works but in the above pair they are on the inside. In that case the two animals would be looking quite different ways. There is no way to ascertain what Hokusai intended, but according to the Ota Museum there are some other examples in which Hokusai signed like this. The Dragon has gone back to Guimet now. The Tiger is at Ota, and is on exhibit from time to time.

The new year 2011 is a year neither of a tiger or a dragon but of a rabbit for us. We are not able to leap, let alone leap in the dark, but we can at least listen. Anyway a very Happy New Year !

(Hokusai's works from internet)