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context: painting > general comments
Formats
The two major characteristic Japanese picture formats are the two main types of picture scroll.
The hanging scroll is called a kakemono, and is generally something like twice as high as it is wide.
More unusual, and more misunderstood, is the handscroll or makimono. This is generally not very high, but is often many yards long. These were not displayed as we now tend to see them, stretched along a wall in a museum, but were held rolled up in both hands, and slowly unrolled, so the viewer would see just a couple of feet of the image at any time. Note that these were 'read' right to left - most Western museums will display them to make that the less natural sequence. There is more on this in the upcoming narrative section.
Another oddity is the columnar print, the hashirakake - designed to fit on a wooden column of a home, very narrow (say 12cm) and perhaps five times as high.
Prints were produced in a number of standard formats, but note that much of what we think of as 'prints' were created as pages of books, or as parts of uniform series, so fixed sizes were imposed.
There are other distinctive and specialised formats such as the fan and the folding screen, of major importance through many centuries of Japanese art, but barely a footnote in Western books. Note that folding screens were generally arranged in zigzags, and the 90 degree angles would mean the whole composition would not be seen straight on at any time.
In addition, note that many major artists produced works on plates, a mode that has only been taken up more recently in the West, to mostly dreadful effect.