Japanese polychrome woodblock prints date back to the mid-eighteenth century. Nishiki-e, which are sometimes called "brocade pictures," originated as privately printed calendars commissioned by wealthy townspeople and samurai. Employed as newspaper illustrations from the 1870s on, most nishiki-e sold for the equivalent of pennies. This triptych depicts the main Ginza street, where urban sophisticates wearing Western clothing and foreign soldiers in uniform mingle with kimono-clad Japanese. One-point perspective, a convention first used in the seventeenth century in uki-e, or theater scenes, reveals a wide, continuous, plunging roadway—a radical departure from old Tokyo’s twisting, narrow streets—lined with two-story shops with Western-style balconies and bordered with the signature Ginza willow trees.