#033 Yotsugi towing waterway

The 33rd views in Utagawa Hiroshige’s “100 Famous Views of Edo” is Yotsugi towing waterway, and the original painting is here.

Kameido In the Edo period, there was a waterway here that was used by boats that pulled passengers in small boats along a rope tied to the shore by a person on the shore. Although it was actually a straight-flowing waterway that had been artificially dug out for flood control and irrigation, Hiroshige, in his characteristic way, bent it into an S-shape and showed it from a bird’s eye view in the distance, and he even added the mountains of Tsukuba or Nikko in the distance beyond the clouds.

As I always say, even in the Edo period, you couldn’t see that far (lol).

On the old maps I’ve seen, this waterway is called the Ayasegawa River, and this name has been passed down to the present day. So here is what the Ayasegawa River looks like in the area around Yotsugi in Katsushika Ward in 2025.

I’m looking in the northwest direction, towards the upper reaches of the river. The river on the left is the Arakawa River, which flows parallel to the riverbank, and the elevated expressway on the right is the Metropolitan Expressway Central Loop Line, so I should be standing in roughly the same place as in the old picture, but the scenery has changed a lot (the map at the bottom of the page should make it easier to understand).

Leaving the Metropolitan Expressway aside, the old picture does not depict the large river adjacent to this location. Why did it suddenly appear here?

After doing a little research, I found that this was not the magic of Hiroshige, but that there was indeed no large river in this area in the Edo period. After the Meiji period, a huge flood control channel was newly built here after several large-scale construction projects were carried out with the aim of flood control in the capital, and we now call it the Arakawa River.

Not only the Ayasegawa River, but the huge Arakawa River is also an artificial river. Isn’t that a little surprising?

The river in the foreground is the Ayasegawa, and the river with the truss of the railway bridge beyond the bank is the Arakawa.

In addition to the overcast weather, there was quite a bit of yellow sand floating around that day, so the view of Skytree was completely obscured.

In Yotsugi, there was another thing that surprised me besides the Arakawa River.
The nearest Keisei Yotsugi Station was an amazing one.

It is said that this area is the birthplace of Yoichi Takahashi, the author of the classic “Captain Tsubasa”, which has inspired generations of young footballers all around the world. That’s why Yotsugi Station is almost like Captain Tsubasa Station.

The station is filled with characters from the Captain Tsubasa series.

I missed recording it, but the audio announcements played in the stations and on the platforms are also voiced by anime characters.