The Great Wave
by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849)

Although we in the West usually refer to the picture shown here as "The Great Wave", the proper title is "Great wave off the coast of Kanagawa Bay", or Fugaku sanjurokkei: Kanagawaoki namiura.

Japan operated in a fuedal system at that time. The central government kept regional governors in line by insisting that some family members should always remain in Tokyo as hostages for the governor's performance.

The continual presence of wealthy visitors in search of diversion gave birth to an industry that entertained and catered to them, to a degree not seen earlier in Japan. Theaters gave plays, composers wrote music, and artists drew and sculpted.

These works focused on images, persons, and events that were not always accurate to the corporeal world, and were referred to as belonging to Ukiyo-e, or the floating world. As we struggle to deal with the notion of virtual business processes, the time of Ukiyo-e provides a historical background for a discussion of virtual entities.

The picture seen here is from a series, "Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji", which was created by Hokusai when he was in his seventies. In this print, snow-capped Mt. Fuji can be seen through the rough sea rising majestically in the background.

Hokusai said that when he looked at Mt. Fuji, he saw the white-tipped peak as the powerful wave of the Japanese people, which inspired this image. We should point out that the picture should be viewed from the right to the left, with the eye starting with the people in the boats, then the eye sees Mt. Fuji, then the eye sees the stern of the boat and the Great Wave.

This work greatly influenced Western artists, especially nineteenth-century Impressionist painters. Also, this piece was adopted for the cover picture of the first edition of "The Sea" ("La mer") by Claude Debussy, published in 1905.

Finally, in the 1980's a computer company developed a variation on Hokusai's classic, dramatising the change from a physical/analog paradigm to a virtual/fractal/digital paradigm, with the image below:


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