Mount Fuji: Sacred Mountain of Japan

Mount Fuji has always stirred the imagination of artists. Many Japanese print artists, including some of the greatest like Hokusai and Hiroshige, have attempted to capture the spirit of this mountain in their designs. This book offers an overview of the many faces of Mount Fuji as seen through the eyes of such artists. The introduction focusses on Mount Fuji in mythology, early portrayal, pilgrimage history, and its depiction in Japanese prints - in particular, the work of Hokusai and Hiroshige. The catalogue contains further chapters on Mount Fuji from the Tōkaidō, Fuji and the Chushingura drama, Fuji and poetry (surimono), Fuji seen from Edo (present-day Tokyo) and Fuji: The thirty-six views.

Christiaan Uhlenbeck has been a Japanese print dealer since 1982. In the early 1990s he became active in the organization of exhibitions for museums on Ukiyo-e, Shin-hanga and Japanese photography. The organization of the travelling exhibition of Shin-hanga prints from the collection of Robert O. Muller and the co-production of the accompanying catalogue, The New Wave: Twentieth-century Japanese Prints from the Robert O. Muller Collection (1993) was the springboard for the formation of Hotei Publishing for which he currently acts as a consultant. His most recent projects include the curatorship of the large exhibition and co-authorship on shunga (Japanese Erotic Fantasies: Sexual Imagery of the Edo Period, 2005). His main interest is the commercial environment of Japanese printmaking, about which he initiated a conference on this subject in 2001. He has recently turned to the investigation of the methodology in the study of Japanese prints.
Merel Molenaar is a M.A. graduate of Japanese Studies from Leiden University. She currently works for the Japanese Embassy in the Netherlands.