Great Wave off the Coast of Kanagawa

The image used on the Welcome to Tsunami! page is adapted from a wood-block print, the Great Wave off the Coast of Kanagawa, by Hokusai, a famous late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Japanese artist. Part of The Thirty-Six Views of Fuji series (1823-29), this print, although often used a graphic in tsunami literature, is somewhat misleading in that context because tsunamis do not always manifest themselves as the huge breaking waves depicted in the print. An unmodified copy of the original print (183 K), scanned from a Japanese greeting card, can be downloaded.