A Tour of the Waterfalls of the Provinces

A Tour of the Waterfalls of the Provinces (Shokoku taki meguri) is a series of landscape woodblock prints by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusai.

The waterfalls take up most of each sheet, dwarfing the scenes' human inhabitants, and are rendered by Hokusai with a powerful sense of life, reflecting his animistic beliefs.

Buddhism in Japan was entwined with Shinto's older animistic beliefs: that gods and spirits inhabit the surrounding nature, such as trees, rocks or animals.

The waterfalls Hokusai chose to illustrate are located in the central, western and eastern parts of Japan's main island (Honshu).

The round gorge before the falls was considered to resemble the head of Buddha,[5] and Hokusai renders it with a sense of mystery by depicting it from a bird's-eye view, while the rest of the scene is portrayed from the front.