Hokusai Returns

“Hokusai Returns: Japan’s Greatest Ukiyo-e Artist“ (1987) is a Japanese television documentary about a project undertaken in 1986 to take a collection of woodcut blocks by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and return them to Japan to make new woodblock prints from them. The collection had been donated to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts by William S. Bigelow (1850-1926), an American who had lived in Japan for a number of years in the 1880s. The film documents the process of making the new prints. Special attenti