I would think we should look at it somewhere in the middle. We can't truly know what Hokusai was thinking, or even if he truly understood the forces in his mind

I would think we should look at it somewhere in the middle. We can't truly know what Hokusai was thinking, or even if he truly understood the forces in his mind. But the art now has a life of its own. It represents just as much for him as it can for us. Even the fact that a Japanist artist decided to look to Prussia for a certain color could suggest that Japan, or at least Hokusai, was opening up to the world, and to globalism and industrialism. I like to remember James Joyce's words in Ulysses: "The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring."