Accidentally yesterday I watched 'Miss Hokusai' about a daughter of the artist - she was a painter herself. The (animated) movie can be seen as a series of episodes, with the relations between Katsushika Ōi and her father being one of the subjects presented. From a quick glance at the (English) Wikipedia page about Hokusai I could spot some divergences compared to the movie. Anyway, I enjoyed the move quite a bit.
Hokusai is great and as with all ukiyo-e, you can buy a nice reprint for around hundred bucks. It was supposed to be mass-produced and not be in a single exemplair somewhere on a wall in museum.
I think the person you’re responding to may mean “have them professionally printed” - where you can have a museum quality print, or even have it printed on canvas etc. for example: a 16x20 canvas print in decent quality is ~$20.
That's not ukiyo-e, it's a copy ukiyo-e made on a printer. You can just have a real thing that is actually ukiyo-e from original forms. If it's not scam of course.
Uniqlo recently released tshirts with some of these prints on. Oiwa-san was on one of them. They also had a few tshirts with the great wave and some from Hiroshige's 53 stations of the Tokkaido road. They're good quality tshirts. Probably sold out though.
If you're in Kansas City, you might check out the Hokusai exhibit in the Nelson-Atkins (which runs until Jan 5th). I particularly enjoyed some prints from Hokusai's daughters they of women at work (as fishermen, farmers, geisha).
There were also some learning materials created by Hokusai, like diagrams explaining methods to make characters seem balanced, or stock art gridded for transfer. It was an interesting peek being the curtain.
The last image Obsession (Shûnen) the article mentions is a Swastika which though technically correct is actually a Sauvastika. The Swastika associated with Nazi bends to the right. The most common Japanese reading for 卍 the symbol that bends to the left is Manji. The 卍 (manji) symbol is frequently used to indicate a temple on maps in Japan, although due to confusion that tourists frequently have regarding 卍 and 卐 this is slowly changing.
Fwiw the term 'sauvastika' was invented in 1850 by European scholars to try to describe/explain why sometimes it went the other direction. These are the same geniuses who helped popularize the myth of the "Aryans" that led to Hitler's idiotic interpretation (he literally thought "Aryans" were Nordic peoples who invaded India, descended from the lost city of Atlantis, despite the actual Indo-Aryan people being basically Iranian...). The word doesn't mean anything and you can just say swastika.
Some cultures have specific meanings for specific directions, like how for Buddhists the left-turning one represents the Buddha's footprints, and for Hindus the right-turning one represents the expansion of the universe. 'The one associated with the Nazis' is therefore also associated with many other cultures and uses, but we Westerners being poorly educated and not exposed to other cultures, can only focus on the Western symbolism (ignoring how it was a popular symbol throughout the West from 1880-1920).
