You are never far from a great wave. Its foaming crest froths and sputters like ghostly fingers or monstrous claws raking over tote bags and journals. You can probably find it miniaturised in your emoji keyboard on your phone, and fading on a mouse mat or pair of socks somewhere nearby. The image – officially known as Under the Wave off Kanagawa, from Katsushika Hokusai’s series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji – depicts small boats facing down a large wave, and almost two centuries after its creation its appeal spans generations, continents, and socioeconomic bands.
In 2023, a Great Wave print sold for a record $2.76m (£2.26m) at Christie’s in New York. The following year, in Japan, the image debuted on the new 1,000 yen banknote, the country’s lowest-value paper money. You can equally well hang the wave from your keyring or apply its decals to your Porsche. British heritage companies such as Dartington Crystal sell it wrapped around fusty-looking vases, while at the edgier end of the high street, Urban Outfitters has printed it on to clothing. It is almost impossible to imagine where a Great Wave would look out of place. You can even buy it splashed across an umbrella. It must feel strange to keep dry under a great wave, but this artwork has become a catch-all image, the ultimate mixer of metaphors. The design itself – with its tiny Mount Fuji and vast wave – seems to give permission to play with scale.
Of course, the Great Wave was made to be reproduced. It has never had a definitive form. Hokusai’s original brush drawing would have been destroyed when the printers cut the woodblocks in 1831, and though no one knows exactly how many impressions from the original blocks still exist, it’s thought to be about 100. No two prints could ever have been the same. Variation was built into its creation – yet somehow, despite or perhaps because of all the variations, the design itself retains, whatever its context, a sort of universal meaningfulness.
“Iconic is used so loosely these days,” says Alfred Haft, a curator in the British Museum’s Asia department. “But that print happens to be iconic. It is direct and impactful. It speaks immediately. It stands so well for all kinds of things.”
But what exactly? And why does this image in particular carry such extraordinary momentum today?
“It’s a personality test,” says Sarah E Thompson, who curated the Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence exhibition at Museum of Fine Arts Boston. She herself owns a pair of Great Wave socks and considered tiling her shower with a Hokusai waterfall. She thinks the image’s composition has a lot to do with its power: “That big curve. The fact that you are looking at it from underneath. This huge wall of water curving over. The asymmetrical composition.” And then the picture asks you, she says: “Are you a pessimist or an optimist? Who are the men in the boats? Will they make it? It’s a landscape, but it’s not just a view.”
The Great Wave’s influence ripples widely, in all kinds of iterations from the impressionists to TikTok. Van Gogh was in awe of the wave’s “claws” and it has even been argued that the Dutch artist drew inspiration from it for one of his most celebrated works, The Starry Night. Claude Monet hung a copy of the Great Wave on his wall. Warhol sketched Waves (After Hokusai) and Roy Lichtenstein has said he was thinking of Hokusai when he exaggerated the sea in Drowning Girl. Claude Debussy had the image published on the cover of the sheet music for La Mer (The Sea) in 1905. Three years ago, a fragment of the wave featured on Gabrielle Zevin’s bestselling novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, in which the protagonists collaborate on a video game inspired by Hokusai’s print. Even the popular title “The Great Wave” testifies to the image’s ever-enlarging consumer appeal, since it was widely thought to be coined in the late 19th century by Hokusai’s biographer Edmond de Goncourt, because, Thompson says, “He wanted people to see [the image] as more universal.”
De Goncourt may not have envisaged Great Wave tattoos and eye makeup but, these days, anyone can make their own Great Wave. In 2023, Lego released a Great Wave set, with nearly 2,000 pieces and a very adult price point of £89.99. You can also cross-stitch it, crochet it, quill it, quilt it and paint it on your trainers. Steven Wang, who first came across the image in a textbook while growing up in Shanghai, and now has a Great Wave screensaver and a print on his bedroom wall, sells kits in his Omamori shop to recreate the wave using beads. Their “tactile quality showcases movement and energy”, he says. “It’s as if the wave is breaking from the frame.”
Haft thinks that the image is “so embedded in world culture” that many people encounter it long before they become aware of it – “you know, a reference to it that you don’t even know is a reference … A fragment of a wave towering over something”, a sort of high-art wallpaper or logo. He cannot remember when he first came across it. Wang knew it as “the blue wave” when he was a child. Atsuko Okuda, curator at the Sumida Hokusai Museum in Tokyo, first saw the Great Wave on a card showcasing famous paintings that came free inside packets of rice seasoning. Charley Murphy, a nail artist based in Worthing, West Sussex, saw it on a poster in her primary-school classroom. Nearly 20 years later, “I thought if I can remember that, it’s going to be great on nails,” she says. She Googled “big wave” then “got the picture up and made it teeny, teeny tiny” on her clients’ fingernails. Now, when customers ask for a “beach-style nail”, she incorporates specks and swirls of the Great Wave, droplets of Hokusai’s design that will eventually chip or fade and be painted over.
In the bustle of the British Museum gift shop, it is easy to see the commercial value of Hokusai’s print. The Great Wave tote bag hangs next to one featuring Queen Elizabeth II, and only Harry Potter rivals the wave’s range of items. The Sumida Hokusai Museum sells Great Wave jelly beans. The MFA Boston has just announced a new collaboration with Uniqlo for a range of Hokusai T-shirts. The Great Wave “is definitely top three in terms of licensing and retail”, says Debra LaKind, the museum’s senior director of intellectual property and business development. “Up there with Monet.”
Alongside the rampant commercialisation of the image, there is a sort of scholars’ race, too. A while back, Thompson considered selling two of MFA Boston’s impressions of The Great Wave but is glad she didn’t. “Because now we can brag about having seven.” She would like more. “We could certainly use one or two more really good impressions,” she says. The British Museum acquired its third impression in 2008. “A great investment”, Thompson says, adding that it is in such good condition that it has spurred “really cutting edge research on Hokusai”.
Four floors above the gift shop at the British Museum, and past the throng of schoolchildren gathered at the Egyptian mummies, it is possible to view this print by request in the Asia department’s study room. It is spacious and quiet; a party is viewing Ming dynasty ceramic roof tiles. Propped on a wooden stand on a large square table, Hokusai’s print – which is “probably the best example in Europe”, according to Haft – looks surprisingly small. The paper is clean, the lines sharp. The pinky peach of the sky is clear, albeit with a brownish tint. It was probably printed early in the run, when the woodblocks were still in good shape and the colours strong; you can see the woodgrain in the grey (once black) sky around Mount Fuji, the intense Prussian blue of the waves.
Everything in the picture is in flux – apart from Mount Fuji, a sort of light at the end of the tunnel. The large wave circles powerfully round, implying continual renewal. It is a freeze-frame of a difficult moment, but the composition tells us everything will be OK. It’s a testament to resilience (maybe that’s why some people like to get the wave tattooed on the most painful parts of the arm). “There are different ways of translating the Japanese title,” Haft says. “It could be through the wave, beyond or behind. It’s a challenge. But they’ll get through it.”
Okuda thinks that the image shows “the grand scale of nature v humans”. It certainly speaks to the climate crisis, and to migration. Japan was following the sakoku isolationist policy when Hokusai designed his print. Trade was restricted. Foreign nationals couldn’t enter Japan. Overseas travel was forbidden. In this context, the new and exotic Prussian blue pigment – likely imported from Europe via China – would have been startling to Hokusai’s first buyers. Maybe that is another reason why this image feels hopeful. He put the world beyond the wave on paper.
