Before the publishing of “Thirty-Six views of Mt. Fuji”, there was no area of landscape in ukiyo-e and Katsushika Hokusai made it popular at first as an artist.

But he almost washed his hand of woodblock printings in 1834 after completed many artworks including “A Tour of Japanese Waterfalls (Shokoku Takimeguri,諸国滝廻り）”, “One Thousand Images of the Sea/Oceans of Wisdom (Chieno Umi,千絵の海）” and “One Hundred views of Mt. Fuji”(Fugaku Hyakkei, 富嶽百景). At that time, he was 75 years old and his painting name was “Gakyo rojin manji”（画狂老人卍, Old Crazy Painter Swastica）. It is a name that seems to be his obsession to reach the summit of the art.

“Gakyo” represented “obsessed and crazy with painting”, “rojin” was an old man, and “manji” had the meaning of his hope for living to be a hundred.

Since then Hokusai focused the artworks on the original paintings. The themes were animals and plants, religion, and history or stories of Japan and China. The self-portrait of him at the top of this page was about 80 years old.

The ceilling picture “Dragon” and “Raging billows angry waves” for the festival float in Obuse, Nagano prefecture, was one of the his masterpieces when he was 85 and 86. “Raging billows angry waves” evokes “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”.