• Materials
• Before the Lesson
• Internet Resources Directory
• Activities
• Extensions

1. In this activity, students will work with images of Japanese woodblock prints. They are available in the following formats:

• As postcards (in CAP resource kits distributed after September, 2003): Approximately one half of the postcards in the envelope in the back of the binder depict Japanese woodblock prints by Hiroshige, Hokusai, Utamaro, and others (on the back of each postcard, you will find information on artist, date, and medium of each image). You can use any of these postcards, having two or three students share an image if necessary. You won’t need the postcards depicting textiles, ceramics, sculptures, etc. for this lesson.

• As slides (in CAP resource kits distributed before September, 2003): there are two examples of Japanese woodblock prints: Slide # 11, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, by Katsushika Hokusai and slide # 19, Courtesan Holding a Fan by Kitagawa Utamaro.

• As full-screen images on this site. If all students can be looking at a computer screen, they can go to: Artwork in the "For Students" Section and do the activity while viewing the picture on the computer screen. You can also find links to comprehensive image databases with high-quality digital reproductions in the online resources directory, under the heading “Japanese Art”.

2. All students will need an Art Questionnaire, which will provide them with a guide for looking at these images. It also includes a preliminary writing exercise that might serve as a foundation for the haiku students will eventually write at the end of this lesson. Please make sure that every student receives one copy of this sheet.

3. Make sure you have a map of Japan in the classroom. Alternatively you can use the map in the Focus on: Geography section.

4. Students will need to have access to the Focus on: Haiku sheet with instructions on how to write a haiku. They should also be able to go to Focus on: Japanese Seasons section as research material for your students. Make a copy of these sheets for each student or use them as overhead transparencies.

5. Art supplies: paper, pencils, colored pens for drawing (crayons, colored pencils, or felt-tip pens)

6. Computer Resources

Modem: 56.6 Kbps or faster.
Browser: Netscape Navigator 4.0 or above or Internet Explorer 4.0 or above.
Personal computer (Pentium II 350 MHz or Celeron 600 MHz) running Windows 95 or higher and at least 32 MB of RAM. Macintosh computer: System 8.1 or above and at least 32 MB of RAM.

The teacher will need to do the following before beginning this lesson.

1. Review materials list and make sure you have located, and, if necessary, printed and copied the materials necessary for this lesson. Make sure you follow the links in the activities section for more background information.

2. Some of the historical/cultural background information for this lesson is directed more toward middle school students and might be too advanced for elementary school kids. However, you as a teacher can easily tailor the lesson to the age of your students by leaving out some of this information. The activities themselves are very straightforward and suitable for students of different ages.

Click here for websites providing supplementary information for students and teachers on Japanese art and culture. These websites are not essential to the lessons that follow but might serve as useful resources in addition to the information on this site.

Every website we link to was visited by our team before we activated the link to make sure it's appropriate for children. But we do not monitor or control these sites and they can change. In addition, many of these sites may have links to other sites, which we have not reviewed.

A. Famous Views (20 minutes / Looking Exercise)

“I envy the Japanese for the enormous clarity that pervades their work. It is never dull and never seems to have been made in haste. Their work is as simple as breathing and they draw a figure with a few well-chosen lines with the same ease, as effortless as buttoning up one's waistcoat ....”
Vincent van Gogh to Theo van Gogh, 24 September 1888

STEP 1: Make sure all students have a Japanese woodblock print to look at. This could either be a projected slide, a postcard or an image from the web. If you are working with postcards or Internet pictures, it is ok for two or three students to share one image as long as each of them can clearly see all the details. In this activity, students are visual detectives who are using the visual evidence in front of them to find out as much about Japan as possible. You can guide them in this by choosing images that will give them particular clues: prints depicting Japanese architecture, people wearing kimonos, Japanese lanterns or umbrellas or pictures of a famous landscape (Mt. Fuji, for example) lend themselves particularly well to this. You can find links to websites with digital images of Japanese art in the Internet Resources section.

Or click on the titles below to access some excellent examples of Japanese woodblock prints from Hiroshige’s series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo from the 1850s:

• The Plum Orchard at Kameido

• Evening Rain at Atake on the Great Bridge

• Dawn at the Kanda Myojin Shrine

• Irises at Horikiri

• Kyo Bridge and the Bamboo Bank of the Sumida River

• Maple Leaves and the Tekona Shrine and Bridge at Mama

• Kinryuzan Temple at Asakusa

• Susaki and the Jumantsubo Plain near Fukagawa

• Kasumigaseki

STEP 2: Ask your students to explore the picture for about one minute before you hand out copies of the Art Questionnaire (one per student). Ask the class to answer the questions with as much detail as possible. Encourage them to look closely. Tell them that there are no wrong answers to these questions as long as their observations are based on what can be seen in the picture.

STEP 1: Ask your students to report back on their findings. Make sure that they can back up their claims by referring to visual evidence in the picture. While everyone in the class looks at the image (online or by circulating the postcard around the room), have two to four students respond to each of the following questions:

• What is going on in the picture?

• What is the place like?

• What time is it in the picture (season, day or night)?

You can then open up the discussion, encouraging students to comment on other things they noticed about their image. This might concern colors, shapes, perspective (some of the images put the viewer in very interesting places, where things in the foreground frame the view into the image, etc.).

STEP 2: If it hasn’t emerged from the conversation yet, ask your students where they think the picture was made and when. Ask them what in the image makes them think so. They might guess it’s from Asia because of the writing on the prints or because of clues given by architectural and clothing style. Tell your students these images were made in 19th-century Japan. Show them on a map where Japan is located. Explain that it is a chain of more than 3000 islands in the Pacific. You can find a map and some basic geographical information in the Focus on: Geography section. Talk about how a particular geographical location of a country influences the everyday life of its inhabitants. What are typical jobs/activities for people in a nation surrounded by water?

STEP 3: Discuss the climate in Japan. Students can go to (or look at copies of) the Focus on: Japanese Seasons section of this website to learn more. Tell the students that nature plays a very important role in Japanese art. Discuss what elements of the different seasons can be found on the images they studied.

STEP 4: Tell the class that the images they have been looking at are called woodblock prints and explain how they are made. For information on the artistic and production process of these prints, go to Focus on: Woodblock Prints. Tell your students that these prints were often produced in large editions and that the same set of woodblocks could be used to make thousands of prints. Tell them that during the 19th century, they became a true mass medium.

STEP 5: Use the information given in the Focus on: Edo pop-up window to provide your students with some historical background on the Edo period. Stress how changes in the structure of Japanese society after 1600 and the emergence of a money-based economy have lead to the rise of a strong middle class with a passionate interest in education, art, travel, and a range of other pleasures that were formerly only accessible to members of the aristocracy. Discuss how this is reflected in the subjects artists chose for woodblock prints, most of which deal with everyday life and the activities of regular people (attending festivals, going for walks, playing with kites, shopping, dressing up, etc.). Refer back to what students discovered in the first part of this lesson.

C. Zooming In (20-30 minutes / Drawing Exercise / Discussion)

STEP 1: Make sure everyone in the class has pens (markers, colored pencils, or crayons) and paper for this exercise. Ask your students to pick a detail of their picture (the same as in part A of this lesson) that is in some way important to the whole image. This could be a person, a branch of a tree, a mountain, etc. Have them draw an imaginary frame around this detail. Ask them to create a drawing based on this part of the original picture, blowing it up to fit on an entire page. As in the process of creating a woodblock print, ask your students to make an outline drawing first and then fill in the color.

STEP 2: Discuss some of the results of this exercise. Have students explain why they picked the detail they chose and what its connection to the entire image is.

D. Do you Haiku?

STEP 1: Use the information in the Focus on: Haiku section of this website to explain the characteristics of a haiku to your students. Read and discuss the poems in class, talking about how they reflect the different elements of Haiku. Discuss the similarities between woodblock prints and haiku poems as product of a popular mass culture devoted to the representation of everyday experiences. Discuss how both artistic forms are interested in finding beauty and enchantment in ordinary things, thus carrying the experience of them to a higher level.

STEP 2: Ask students to write a haiku inspired by their drawing. They might want to use some of the words they came up with when filling out the art questionnaire. For inspiration, encourage them to “step into their drawing”: what does it sound, smell, feel like?

STEP 3: Once the haiku is composed, ask your students to insert the text of their haiku into their drawing. Depending on the spatial layout of their drawing, they might want to write vertical lines, fit their text into a box, write on part of the drawing, etc. Then display all drawings and encourage the class to look at each other’s work.

STEP 4: Lead a discussion on how these drawings with haiku compare to the images they are based on. If several students were using the same picture, have each of them explain the choices they made and the process they followed. Highlight where this led to entirely different outcomes.

 

Variations, Follow-up Activities

1. Haiku American-Style: Brainstorm what might be “kigos” for the different season as they are experienced in New York City (baseball, icecream, school, ice-skating). Assign students to search for photographs of everyday-life in America from newspapers, magazines, or the Internet. Have them choose a detail of an image, blow it up in a drawing and write a haiku about the moment it depicts.

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