One Hundred Famous Views of Edo No.94Red maple leaves, Tekona Shrine and Tsugihashi Bridge at Mama

The easternmost river which flowed from north to south in Edo city was the Old Tone River. A village called Mama was located east of the river and was outside the boundary of Edo city. This is the interesting aspect of this print, because this series is entitled “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo”. It is only because this spot was very famous for the beautiful red maple leaves at Guho Temple (founded in 737), and thus very popular with Edo people, that Hiroshige included it in the series.
There was once a huge maple tree on the temple grounds, 13 metres tall and measuring two lengths of a man’s arm-span around, which helped make Mama village famous for its maple leaves (“Momiji”). To reach this remote place, Edo people usually travelled by boat from the centre of the city, first taking a route through the Onagi and Shin rivers, crossing the Sumida and Naka rivers up to Gyotoku, and then travelling up the Old Tone River north to Mama. Visitors stayed at Mama overnight, enjoyed the beautiful scenery of maple leaves in the morning and then returned to Edo that same day.
This print shows the scenery from the hill where the temple stood. At the foot of the hill was a small shrine called Tekona, which is seen between the trunks of two maple trees in the foreground. The shrine was so called because it enshrined a female commoner named Tekona. She was a beautiful woman who lived in ancient times and was mentioned in a poem included in the “Manyoshu”, a collection of Japanese verse from the 4th to the 8th century. She was more beautiful than noble ladies and was persistently wooed by many men. She became very panicky and, unable to rid herself of the persistent male admirers, killed herself by diving into a nearby inlet. Sympathizing with the unfortunate woman, the local people erected a small shrine on the land along the inlet to enshrine her.
Beyond the shrine is a small bridge called Tsugihashi, literally “joining bridge”, spanning a brook. In this area, many sandbars were formed and bridges connecting one sandbar with another were called Tsugihashi