hold a balance between large-scale production, technical excellence, and aesthetic value which is almost unmatched in the modern world.
The art of the early Tokugawa period was in many ways already a popular art as contrasted with that of Ashikaga times, but as the Edo age progressed it grew even more markedly popular. The work of the sculptor became largely the production of small, often amusing trinkets for popular use, and the subject matter of the graphic arts became increasingly the city people and their life. Great artists, instead of working to beautify the palaces of rulers, produced pictures to fit the tastes and pocketbooks of the bourgeoisie. This was particularly evident in the development of the technique of wood-block printing, which made it possible to reproduce hundreds of copies of a single colored picture and to sell them at reasonable prices. This art for the masses reached a glorious culmination in the early nineteenth century in the work of two great masters, Hokusai and Hiroshige. The wood block print, as exemplified in their works, has become the form of Japanese art best known in the occidental world.
The development of a complicated commercial economy and a strong merchant class were not the only ways in which the foundations for a modernized Japan were being laid during the Tokugawa period. Interest in Europe and things European was reviving. Christianity and possible foreign aggression had become such dead issues by 1720 that Edo removed a long-standing ban on the study of the West and the importation of European books—with the exception, of course, of anything dealing with Christianity. Soon a