Hokusai was born on October 31, 1760, in the Katsushika district of Edo -- the old name for Tokyo. His father was Nakajima Ise, a mirror-maker who crafted designs for the shogun. The boy began painting around the age of six, possibly inspired by watching his father paint ornamental patterns around the edges of mirrors. By his teens he was apprenticed to a woodblock engraver, and by 20 he was producing ukiyo-e prints under his first professional name. He would go on to adopt at least 30 different names, each signaling a new artistic phase -- a habit unusual even by the standards of Edo-period artists, who routinely used multiple pseudonyms. The name Katsushika was drawn from his birthplace; Hokusai means 'north studio,' an homage to the North Star and to a deity in his Nichiren Buddhist faith. Despite all the name changes and the more than 90 moves across the city, he stayed rooted in Sumida. He walked these streets to sketch the Ryogoku Bridge, Mimeguri Shrine, and the banks of the Sumida River -- the same landscapes that fill his prints.

Pritzker Prize-winning architect Kazuyo Sejima -- one half of the celebrated firm SANAA -- designed the museum as a monolithic block split by angular cuts. The exterior is clad entirely in panels of pale aluminum that shift in tone with the changing light, sometimes reflecting the surrounding apartment blocks and park trees so completely that the building seems to dissolve into its neighborhood. That effect is deliberate. The requested volume was divided into smaller interlocking masses to match the scale of the residential area around it. These smaller volumes merge into one building at certain floors and separate into distinct forms at others, creating the slits and gaps that serve as the museum's only sources of natural light -- there are no conventional outward-facing windows. The design protects the fragile ukiyo-e works inside from damaging sunlight while allowing daylight to filter through the triangular apertures deep into the galleries. Multiple entrances at ground level blur the line between sidewalk and museum, inviting passersby to wander in from any direction, much as Hokusai himself wandered the streets outside.

The museum's permanent collection holds more than 1,800 items: woodblock prints, paintings, preparatory sketches, illustrated books, and personal artifacts tracing Hokusai's career from apprentice to legend. The crown jewels are pieces from the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series, completed around 1831, which includes The Great Wave off Kanagawa -- a composition so iconic it appears on everything from phone cases to album covers centuries after its creation. But the collection also reveals the astonishing breadth of Hokusai's output. He illustrated novels, designed greeting cards, painted large-scale murals, and produced manga -- densely packed sketchbooks of animals, people, landscapes, and mythical creatures that served as teaching aids for other artists. His influence reached Europe in the late 19th century, when Japanese prints began arriving in Paris and captivated Impressionists like Monet, Degas, and van Gogh. What the museum makes viscerally clear is the sheer volume: more than 30,000 works over a career that spanned seven decades, driven by a perfectionism that never let him rest.

Sumida Ward invested in this museum not merely as a cultural institution but as a statement about place. Hokusai was born here. He depicted these riverbanks, these bridges, these shrine gates. The street outside the museum is named Hokusai Dori in his honor. To step from the angular aluminum galleries back onto the sidewalk is to realize that the neighborhood itself is part of the exhibit -- the Sumida River still winds past a few blocks to the east, the old Ryogoku district is a short walk south, and the Asakusa entertainment quarter that fueled Edo's pleasure culture stands just across the water. The museum's fourth-floor gallery uses life-size replicas and interactive displays to recreate Hokusai's cramped studio, stacked with brushes and ink stones, where an old man sat cross-legged and painted with the urgency of someone who believed he was just getting started.