The numbers from that morning sound like a prank. Eighteen meters long by 11 meters wide. One hundred and twenty tatami mats of joined paper laid across a temple yard. Eyes that measured 70 inches wide, a nose stretching 105 inches, and a gaping mouth nearly seven feet across.
On October 5, 1817, years before he would revolutionize color in The Great Wave, a 57-year-old Katsushika Hokusai stepped onto that paper in Nagoya with straw brooms tied to wooden poles, dipping them into wooden vats of ink to paint a colossal portrait of Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism known in Japan as Daruma. For hours, he sprinted and leaped across the paper while thousands of onlookers cheered. It remains one of the wildest stunts in art history.
We tend to think of classical creators of ukiyo-e woodblock prints as quiet, disciplined craftsmen bent over cherry-wood blocks with magnifying lenses. Hokusai was certainly capable of that microscopic precision (he once painted two sparrows on a single grain of rice just to prove he could). But he also understood something modern artists took another century to figure out: art does not have to stay polite, quiet, or small.
Step 1: Treat the ground as your canvas
To understand the sheer physical audacity of the Hokusai Great Daruma, you have to picture the courtyard of the Hongan-ji Nagoya Betsuin temple on that autumn morning. You cannot buy a sheet of paper measuring 59 by 35 feet from a local shop. Hokusai and his pupils had to paste together hundreds of sheets of thick handmade paper, creating a massive paper carpet.
Laying thin paper directly over stone or gravel would have meant immediate disaster. The moment someone stepped on it with inked feet or heavy brushes, the sheets would tear to shreds. Hokusai solved this by carpeting the courtyard with a thick bed of golden straw first. The straw acted as a shock absorber, cushioning his footsteps and preventing the paper from splitting under tension.
The scale presented an immediate optical puzzle. When you stand on a canvas larger than a tennis court, perspective disappears. You cannot step back three paces to check if the left eyebrow matches the right. Every mark has to be executed by muscle memory, geometric intuition, and sheer nerve.
Step 2: Reinvent the brush from household brooms
Standard calligraphic brushes hold about two tablespoons of liquid. Using one on an 18-meter portrait would be like trying to paint a billboard with an eyelash brush. Hokusai needed tools that could deposit gallons of fluid in a single sweeping gesture.
His solution was delightfully unpretentious. He and his assistants took everyday household cleaning brooms, bundle-bound them with extra straw and coarse horsehair, and lashed them to stout wooden handles. Alongside these monster brushes sat cedar tubs and vats filled with rich black sumi ink.
Standard ink, however, would run too quickly on porous paper, soaking through and turning into a giant blot. Hokusai mixed the ink with boiled rice paste (nori). The starch gave the black pigment body and viscosity, allowing the broom bristles to lay down crisp, glossy strokes without bleeding uncontrollably into the seams.
Step 3: Turn the act of making into theater
Hokusai did not sneak into the temple at midnight to work in secret. He printed handbills weeks in advance to whip up public curiosity. By mid-morning, thousands of samurai, merchants, children, and monks packed the perimeter of the courtyard.
Dressed in ceremonial robes with his sleeves bound up by cords, Hokusai turned painting into high-intensity physical athletics. He dipped his broom into the black vat, hoisted the dripping bundle, and ran across the straw-padded paper, dragging thick arcs of ink behind him. Assistants scurried beside him with tubs and cloths, catching stray drips and feeding him freshly loaded brushes.
To the crowd standing on flat ground, the performance looked completely incoherent. They watched an elderly man sweating and shouting instructions while splashing black puddles across a field of white. Up close, an eyebrow 70 inches long just looks like a muddy road. The suspense built for hours because nobody in the audience could actually see what he was building.
Step 4: The vertical reveal
Late in the afternoon, Hokusai dropped his brooms and called for the heavy lifting gear. Workers attached the top edge of the mammoth paper to a long wooden beam. Using ropes and pulleys rigged to temple scaffolding, they slowly hoisted the sheet vertically into the sky.
As the paper rose against the temple facade, the chaotic black smears snapped into alignment. Suddenly, towering over the crowd, was the ferocious, bearded face of Daruma, glaring down with massive circular eyes and wild calligraphic robes billowing in the wind. The crowd erupted into wild applause.
Eyewitness artist Koriki Enkoan was so stunned that he recorded the entire event in a published illustrated book, Hokusai taiga sokusho saizu. Without Enkoan's firsthand sketches, modern historians might have written the story off as an Edo-period myth.
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Why did Hokusai put on this exhausting circus? The answer reveals how shrewd he really was. He was in Nagoya visiting his local publisher, Eirakuya Toshiro, who was preparing the latest volume of the Hokusai Manga, his landmark collection of visual sketches and drawing lessons.
Hokusai understood that you can produce the finest woodblock prints in the world, but attention is earned in the street. The Great Daruma stunt turned him into an overnight folk hero across Nagoya. Locals affectionately nicknamed him "Darusen" (short for Daruma Sensei), poets wrote popular street songs about the feat, and souvenir woodblock reproductions sold out instantly. If you appreciate the bold compositional energy of classical Japanese art prints and curated Japanese wall art, you are seeing the direct fruit of that rebellious showmanship.
What happened to the Hokusai Great Daruma
For more than a century, the original 18-meter scroll was preserved with pride in the storehouses of the Hongan-ji Nagoya Betsuin temple. Visitors would come specifically to view where the Daruma Master had staged his triumph.
Tragically, the original masterpiece no longer exists. In May 1945, intense Allied air raids over Nagoya dropped incendiary bombs that burned the wooden temple complex to the ground, taking Hokusai's paper giant with it. Yet the memory of the performance proved indestructible. In October 2017, for the bicentennial of the event, students from Aichi University of the Arts and the Nagoya City Museum gathered in Nagoya with straw brooms, barrels of ink, and 120 tatami mats of paper to recreate Hokusai's wild painting stroke for stroke.
Hokusai showed us that true artistic mastery does not require delicate reverence. Sometimes, it just requires a vat of ink, a bed of straw, and the nerve to swing a broom like a sword.
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