Fukushima: The Turtle Showing Urashima Taro the Palace of the Dragon King, no. 38 from the series The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaidō

There are many Japanese legends involving the Dragon King, Ryūjin 龍神, who controls the oceans and lives in a beautiful undersea palace, Ryūgū-jō 龍宮城.

In one tale a kind-hearted fisherman, Urashima Tarō 浦島太郎, rescues a sea turtle, who then offers to take him to visit the Dragon King’s palace. While there, the fisherman falls in love with the beautiful Dragon Princess, Otohime 乙姫. After three days together, he begins to worry about his ailing mother back on land and asks for leave to return. The broken-hearted princess gives him a parting gift, a magic box called tamatebako 玉手箱, with the warning that he should never open it. Urashima Tarō is returned to his village, but everything has changed. He soon realizes that what seemed like three days in the palace was really three hundred years, and he wanders around Japan in a daze. Depressed and distracted, he finally opens the magic box and in a instant ages three hundred years, crumbling to dust.

In Kuniyoshi’s remarkable series The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kiso Kaidō the artist made a print for each station of the mountain road between Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto, either illustrating a famous tale associated with the site or creating a clever pun on the station’s name. This print is of the 37th station, Fukushima, but is 38th in the print series, which begins with the starting point, Nihonbashi 日本橋 in Edo.

A legend popular in Fukushima asserts that Urashima Tarō stayed there for a time during his wandering. In the print, the turtle that the fisherman rescued is shown describing the Dragon King’s Palace, represented as a vision emerging form the turtle’s mouth. Further references to the story are seen in the fishing equipment flanking the red series title at the top right, and the border of the small Fukushima mountain landscape at the top left, which is shaped like a turtle.