| Sumario: | This article considers the historical position of neighborhood identities in the city of Edo-Tokyo as represented in woodblock prints depicting the biennial procession of the Kanda shrine festival (Kanda matsuri). Through close analyses of two prints in which I attend to the commercial and local-geographical contexts shaping their production, I argue that the multiple producers of these nineteenth-century works leveraged the neighborhood identities of target consumer audiences to remain viable in a competitive commercial publishing industry. They both responded to and, in turn, molded consumer expectations concerning the invocation of neighborhood identities in the iconography, morphology, and setting of the festival's popular representations. I read these prints against contemporaneous textual sources such as festival programs and festival-administration documents and maps, as well as secondary literature on the Kanda festival. In so doing, I aim to offer a methodology for employing popular visual art as a form of inflected historical evidence in the study of sacred and civic events in Edo-Tokyo that were grounded in local community participation.
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